Recommended If You Like: Acetone, Chad VanGaalen, Duster, Built to Spill, The Olivia Tremor Control, Spirit of the Beehive. “Essential Aliens” is the 10th Helvetia album. Helvetia is the solo project of Jason Albertini from Duster. The songs on “Essential Aliens” were recorded over the last year in Jason's basement. Helvetia resides in Portland, Oregon but was formed in Seattle, Washington in 2005 after Duster first went on hiatus. Since the band’s inception, Jason has continued to employ a rotating cast of band members and collaborators, which now includes Steve Gere and Samantha Stidham. Steve and Jason also played in Built To Spill together from 2012 until 2018.

In 2019 Duster started playing shows and recording again. During this time Jason started writing what would become This Devastating Map. Released at the beginning of August last year, Post-Trash called it ‘a constantly shifting project that takes experimental lo-fi into brilliantly colored psych directions with a concise glow.’ Then the pandemic took hold. With normal life at a standstill and unable to hang with his bandmates, Jason focused his energy on his daughter’s homeschooling schedule, and recording. He focused on finishing one song a day and was soon honing in on a brand new album. “Essential Aliens” takes all the elements of the Helveti.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Not So Infinite Life Of Weird (2:25)
2. Crooks Go In The Ground (2:06)
3. New Mess (2:10)
4. Jumper (1:42)
5. Claw (2:57)
6. That Strange Pull (1:05)
7. Rock On The Ramp (4:20)

Side 2
1. Star Hinged Trap (2:18)
2. Caroline Stays/The Al Snatch (2:27)
3. Why Am I Missing (2:07)
4. The Echo Creek (2:36)
5. Does It Go Backwards (2:21)
6. Better Get Gifted (2:12)
7. Skit 8 (2:15)

Recommended If You Like: The Slits, Amyl & the Sniffers, Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Captain Beefheart, The Drones / Gareth Lidiard, black midi, The Birthday Party / Rowland S. Howard, Bad Brains.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air for Tropical Fuck Storm, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.” The third album from the avant-punk quadaptly titled Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic.

While not quite a protest album, Deep States comes complete with Q drops, nods to the January 6th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven’s Gate to The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night only to betray us by morning. We live in a world in which the bizarre has become the normative, and Tropical Fuck Storm plumbs that paradox. That said, the band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode.

“We make pop records,” frontman Gareth Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” What makes Tropical Fuck Storm so great is the intersection between their dark but satiric storytelling and musical arrangements intent on perverting received canons and wisdoms. These are songs as experiment, advancing and retreating at their own idiosyncratic, deeply unsettling pace. They hang on the slant beat and slide into jazzy, distortion-packed jams so tumultuous they’d make Charlie Mingus proud. Musically, Deep States goes wherever it wants, riffing on pop, R&B, Talking Heads-style new wave, Delta blues, Tom Waits, and some of the band’s hip-hop favorites such as Wu-Tang Clan and Missy Elliot. Barriers aren’t just broken, they seem to have completely fallen away.

In this present moment, parts of the world are opening up, or trying to. But Tropical Fuck Storm is here to remind us that many of our most urgent political and social problems have been around a long time now. Same as it ever was, as another genre bending band once sang. As the signs of the latest crisis subside, and the dull ache of awareness with it, Deep States is here to remind us that there is no foreseeable end to human folly, nor, fortunately, to the creativity that resists it. Over the past few years we’ve all heard the noise in our own heads. Tropical Fuck Storm has made music of it.

TRACK LISTING

The Greatest Story Ever Told
G.A.F.F.
Blue Beam Baby
Suburbiopia
Bumma Sanger
The Donkey
Reporting Of A Failed Campaign
New Romeo Agent
Legal Ghost
The Confinement Of The Quarks