Trust – TRST [Arts And Crafts]

The band is called Trust, the album’s ‘TRST’. It’s been out since February this year in Canada and the States, but by one of those increasingly meaningless quirks of international marketing, only saw its European release last month. That’s relevant not one jot except to explain how I’ve been listening to, and loving, a ‘new’ record for the best part of a year now. The single fact that they’re a dance act on Arts And Crafts makes them worth paying attention, ‘trst’ me on that.

Paradoxically, it’s so much better to review a record 9 months later, after proper gestation. I mean, be honest, look back right now and what you were calling out for a year ago, and what’s turned out to have legs? This is one of the rare 5%, that started out great and is now even more of a go-to choice on the iPod when life’s lacking a bit of sparkle.

I was directed to look for Trust on my way to SXSW this year. I asked a woman of impeccable taste to tell me who she considered unmissably essential, and this was her one and only recommendation. She was right, so much so that after making them one of the first bands I saw, I was right back to see them again the second day; if that had been all I’d managed, would have called the trip a success.

Back then the band was Robert Alfons and Maya Postepski, the latter moonlighting from drumming with Austra. It seems now that Maya is ‘no longer associated with the project’, disappointing because it was such a neat jig-saw, but such is life. Wherever the beats are coming from, the responsibility now hangs around Robert’s dripping vocals and a huge tranche of doom-laden electro. In between the whipping percussion and slab synths, there’s enough shimmer and sparkle to let the light in to the cellar too, even if the chandelier is made of black glass.

They’re out of Toronto, which for a few minutes right now looks like the only relevant city for this sort of intelligent EDM, cold and trancey but with a very human soul.
Robert’s voice is amazing all over this record. It’s as though some 40’s film star (it’d have to be Errol Flynn) had been kept on ice these seventy years, and then let languorously loose in a basement full of bass-subs. You see him, and with due respect, think ‘how does that voice come out of the skinny kid in the leather pants’?

Oh and it’s relevant because after a false start or two (caused by being too much in demand in America) Trust are going to be bringing the live set over here in the dark cold days of the new year.

[Rating:4]