Four piece female group Ghost Car‘s debut album is well and truly all over the place. And I mean that in a good way. First instincts are to compare it to The Slits, due to its punkish leanings, but in all honesty it’s noisier than that, while also being unashamedly pop – in bubblegum type proportions – at other junctures.
‘Mechanical Soul‘ for example is all fuzzy guitars and a heck of a lot of loud. Yet somehow it still calls to mind Tom Tom Club vocally and is all the more aesthetically pleasing for it. Urgency is key throughout Truly Trash and the fiery repetition of just two words (“rolling eyes rolling eyes rolling eyes rolling eyes!“) in the likes of ‘Embleton Road‘ effectively deliver that punch arguably even more effectively than many bands could achieve in three verses!
There’s kind of a socio-political leaning in some places but these songs certainly don’t hold the same kind of cerebral clout lyrically that you might associate with The Jam, Crass or Bad Breeding. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with these words, but deep they are not!
That said, ‘Selfish, Spoiled‘ begins with the question “Selfish, spoiled, can you even see what you destroy?” which is just about as damning an attack on the government as you can get, later backed up with “You have more than us, but nothing is enough, will you ever open your eyes?” – sometimes simple gets the job done just as well.
Later, on ‘Clown Town‘, Cece Corapi laments that “All my friends are leaving the town, another bad decision, another ghost town / Horrible decisions are not in their hands, system, politics, eat out of their hands.” It’s quite an angry record, if truth be told, but honestly, who knew being angry could be this much fun!
Hailing from all over the shop (Italy, Spain, Ireland, UK), this four piece sure knows how to make an entertaining record. There’s not really any let-up, though both ‘Sex‘, which nods towards The Runaways, and ‘No History‘ are somewhat less frantic than the rest, the latter song being like a hybrid of X-Ray Spex and Bow Wow Wow, which is most enjoyable.
Slowest number on the album is the closing, title track, which sounds like it’s going to be an uplifting ‘self-help’ kind of song until it explodes halfway through and starts sounding like the Vivian Girls. It concludes with the words “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. Truly trash. Wankers.“
Well quite.
