Some records, if they don't convince me but I don't understand why, I put them aside and then pick them up after a little while. Sometimes it works out for me. Like here.

#zot2017

Trans AM - California Hotel (Thrill Jockey Records, April 22, 2017)

Revisited after a year, this album by Trans AM ultimately confirms the quality of the previous works of the historic band featuring Phil Manley, Nathan Means, and Sebastian Thomson. Released on April 22, 2017, coinciding with Record Store Day 2017, and obviously on Thrill Jockey, the band's eleventh album is titled "California Hotel" (apparently a tribute to Glenn Frey of the Eagles, who passed away in 2016) and opens immediately with the standout track: "I Hear Fake Voices," six minutes of psychedelic kraut loops and cosmic music over which bands like Tame Impala could have built their entire discography, if only they had a modicum of talent and good taste. But the album has a shape and content that are quite heterogeneous; the following "Staying Power" (purely instrumental) is fundamentally based on a bass groove that somewhat recalls "Anybody Seen My Baby" by the Stones, "Ship Of The Imagination" has that typical hallucinatory and visionary thrilling that has become the hallmark of Maserati, with Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk influences (the use of vocoder...) also present in "Alles Verboten," while the title track and "Expansions" teeter between the kraut-rock of Harmonia and John Carpenter visions, and it goes on like this until the space waves of Spacemen 3 in "I Want 2B Ignored" and the Jean-Michel Jarre west-coast sound of "Rules of Engagement," making for an album that has gained many points for me with each listen and that I consider definitely very good and highly recommended.

#transam #thrilljockey #californiahotel

Trans Am - Rules of Engagement