Truly
Fast Stories...From Kid Coma

"All I want in this desperate night is your hoop of hovering light" Angelhead

An imposing galleon discovered in the sea off Seattle by the great disappeared grunge waves. This is "Fast Stories… From Kid Coma", the first album by Truly, the last of the great North West bands to debut on a full length. Unfortunately, this debut occurred at an unfavorable point in time: in 1995, a year when the myth of the rain city had reached its decline, and various clones intent on devaluing the original essence of grunge started to become widespread. An ambitious and well-crafted product like this, which aimed to go beyond the confines of a genre at that point on the path to fossilization, inevitably fell into anonymity.

A step back is needed. The group was formed in the early '90s, boasting illustrious members from the scene. The drummer Mark Pickerel comes from the Screaming Trees, while the bassist Hiro Yamamoto was the backbone of the early Soundgarden, leaving Cornell and the others due to their overly professional approach post "Louder than Love". The core, however, is constituted by the lesser-known figure, the singer-guitarist-keyboardist Robert Roth. While the nobility of the rhythm section ensures a significant range of solutions, thanks to powerful and sulfurous scans, Roth demonstrates through these grooves that he can enter fully into the city’s artistic elite. Rough and distortion-saturated guitar parts as per the manual are intricately mixed with dreamy organs and exquisite touches of mellotron, revitalizing a golden thread that seemed bled dry: all rounded off with an anthemic and incisive voice, true to Cobain’s style.

"Fast stories… " is a concept album, centered on the memories of a boy in a vegetative state, who relives during dreams a past happy summer. "Time is a dream", said Calderón de la Barca. And in the 70 minutes of this monumental work, time is sublimated masterfully, in its continuous unfolding and rewinding, in a play of returns and abandonments, escapes and returns, submersions and emergences towards the black holes of the unconscious. This journey is aptly soundtracked by the material shaped by the trio, capable of alternating seamlessly hard recrudescences, psychedelic fluctuations, almost pop rhythmicity, and an indie dynamism able to elude the traps of verbosity. The journey begins aboard a "Blue Flame Ford" repainted with powerful and hypnotic laminations; it continues by steering toward stormy hard rock roads paved with amphetamines in "Four girls", "Hurricane dance", and "Virtually"; happily arriving at bizarre lysergic oases in "So Strange", managing among other things to set the liquid charms of the Doors in the infectious fury of Nirvana in "If you don't let it die" and "Angelhead". The last stop is the romantic but disenchanted tour de force of "Chlorine", 11 minutes steeped in purifying dew, an ideal bridge between Woodstock and the first Lollapalooza.

Something precious is thus found in that galleon: the "Zen Arcade" of the Puget Sound.