Album Review: The Golden Years by Trapist

Trapist’s approach to making music seems to fall more in line with free jazz than anything else. Everything feels improvised but brilliant enough to demonstrate the individual members expertise at their craft and understanding of songwriting and structure. There’s moments of unnerving silence and there’s moments of blistering attack that recall the Dirty Three at their most fierce.

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Aside from "Pisa," consisting of mostly silence with slight skronky bits and mood setting, The Golden Years finds Trapist exploring a series of lengthy and exploratory group performances. "The Gun That's Hanging on the Kitchen Wall" starts with a wide-space series of guitar strums, feeling more like an absence than any sort of presence, before the full band joins in on an engagingly woozy flowing improvisation somewhere between mid-'70s Miles Davis-led bands at their more serene and the derivations of those acts in the form of Talk Talk. But there's a spiky, happy energy that always runs to the fore in the overlaid clatter of cymbals and percussion, which then informs the slow ending as a distant hum backs the core guitar and occasional drumming.

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