You Don't Tell Me - Yard Trauma

Last in alphabetical order on the class register of the neo-garage of the '80s, Yard Trauma wrapped up the academic year '84/'85 with flying colors: after the great reviews collected with the "red album" and despite Lee Joseph having effectively disbanded the band and left Tucson for Los Angeles, ending up in the last lineup of Unclaimed, Yard Trauma decided to follow up their debut album: Must‘ve Been Something I Took Last Night is a small classic of the genre with its intrusive Farfisa stomped both by the owner Lance Kaufman and (I‘m Invisible, Situations) by guest Rich Coffee, and the cryptic whirl of guitars that forge the perfect link between the sound of Unclaimed and the more spectral tones of Fourgiven and Plan 9, perfectly balanced between energetic beats (You Don‘t Tell Me, the Situations close to the spirit of Untold Fables, the cover of I‘ve Got a Girl by Dearly Beloved, Only Mistakes) and a psychedelia wrapped in dark hues (Must‘ve Been Something I Took Last Night, Black and White, I‘ve Seen You Walking) and split in half by a magical folk-rock like Dreamt in Color.

Guiltily overlooked at the time even by those who limited themselves to buying the key releases of the neo-garage phenomenon, Must‘ve Been Something I Took Last Night is instead an excellent sample of beat-punk capable of standing up to the small recognized masterpieces of the genre from that time (a step above the debut by Cynics or the second by Lyres, a notch above Stop Pretending by the Pandoras, just to name a few, NdLYS) and that still today adeptly shakes off the dust of time.