Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight, Underground EP: New Beginnings
With last year’s Going Home full-length, UK heavy rockers Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight began to show growth in a heavier direction tonally. Their second album (review here), it kept some of the riffier elements of 2009’s Movin’ On (review here), but was clearly headed someplace else stylistically — a burlier and more metal vibe persisted. The new Underground EP stands as the follow-up to Going Home, and as it was also recorded by drummer Chris West and guitarist/vocalist Pete Holland — also mixed and mastered by West; the three-piece is completed by Dicky King on bass — it’s not so much a surprise that it is likewise loud, meaty and weighted. Where Underground really makes itself separate from the trio’s work up to this point is in its overarching thematic. True to its artwork by Dan Schooler, the five-track collection clocks in at 30 minutes of science fiction-minded lyrics that seem to frame a loose narrative. This happens over the course of the opening title-track and closer “New Beginnings,” while between them, “Echoes Return” gives a personal angle to the story and “Enlightenment” and “Discoveries” provide instrumental continuity. At the same time, Underground is more dynamic stylistically than Going Home, and particularly in “Enlightenment” and “Discoveries,” embellishes a touch of heavy psychedelia that feels like a definite departure from the last album. In terms of approach and storyline, then, Trippy Wicked are trying something new, and whatever sonic similarities the EP has to the LP before it, that’s not the whole tale. In the interest of clarity, I consider myself a fan of Trippy Wicked both as a band and as people, so while my observations on Underground may be and I hope they’re found to be considered, I won’t exactly call them impartial. With that said, Underground strikes as the most complex and accomplished outing Trippy Wicked have crafted yet, and feels more complete as a whole work than its EP tag can properly convey. Released on the band-affiliated Superhot Records, it could just as easily have been dubbed a short album and I’d find no argument.
Holland, whose confidence and range have grown in kind over the band’s five years of releases, is at his most melodically adept here. Whether he’s following his guitar on “Echoes Return” and “Underground” or subtly branching out in the verses of “New Beginnings,” he sounds comfortable in the more relaxed spaces and able to convey a depth of emotionality that wasn’t attempted even on Going Home, which had a narrative thread of its own, mostly about drinking and the resulting raucousness. Maybe it’s the more nuanced thematic bringing out the performance, but it makes more sense to me to think of the evolution as coinciding rather than sparked by one or the other. An all-around growth, in other words. Likewise, the band’s songwriting, while it has long since “clicked” in terms of creating memorable hooks across a variety of moods, seems to have stepped up as well, and Holland, King and West are a tight and fluid trio, each bringing out the best from the compatriot two. Repetition in the choruses of the three tracks with vocals also provides a consistency across the release, giving it even more of a sense of being one whole work, as “Underground” features a series of lines starting with “World slows down/Sun’s burnt out,” and ends with an almost nursery rhyme made of “Down, down, round and round/We’re lost until we’re found,” while “Echoes Return” plays homophones with “I find it hard to believe in you today/I find it hard to be leaving you this way” as a secondary chorus and “New Beginnings” moves into a first-person-plural in starting more of its chorus lines with “We had” or “We can” as it winds down the storyline. All this feeds into the overarching cohesion of Underground, making it a compelling listen that satisfies in more than just its actual audio, but it’s important to remember that although Trippy Wicked are engaging these new methods (or at very least developing past ideas to new levels of refinement), Underground is still very much a heavy rock record. Pretense is nil, and while the production is crisp and full and professional, it’s not so overblown as to take away from the natural feel of the songs themselves.
“Underground” gets underway immediately with a quick intro and echoing verses brought to earth by King‘s low rumble and West‘s steady timekeeping, moving to and through its chorus with a smoothness that sets the standard for the rest of the EP to come. A second cycle through leads to a bass and drum-led break with Holland adding flourish in quiet lead notes. They build tension before crashing back into the chorus and then move into the extended closing section, Holland topping his own leads with the already-noted repetitions. There’s continuity when “Echoes Return” takes hold, the vocals seeming to nod at Sap-era Alice in Chains with the melody and still providing a prelude to the adventurous instrumental cuts to come. Though its central riff is plenty driving, “Echoes Return” also stands testament to a sense of patience emerging in Trippy Wicked‘s sound, and where Going Home tracks like “Ain’t Gonna End Well” and “Hillbilly Moonshine” reveled in push-you-over boogie (nothing against that), “Echoes Return” roots itself in a mid-paced heft that does well to bring out the strength of its hook. With a minute still to go, a fittingly echoed solo rises, but they finish with crunching groove and a dead stop before King starts the intro to “Enlightenment.” A slow build up finds lead notes fading in and West marking the increasing volume in tom hits, and when they take off at 2:04, it’s only after reminding a bit of Tool‘s “Lateralus,” though obviously “Enlightenment” moves in a different direction overall. On first listen, there isn’t much to mark it out the reasoning in not adding vocals, but as the song continues to play out, it departs playing what might have been off a verse of what might have been a chorus and into airier territory entirely, returning to a modified version of the tense intro before giving way again to the riffs that marked out the earlier stretches. Oddly timed starts and stops open to a straightforward progression as “Enlightenment” transitions directly into “Discoveries,” but the latter soon shifts to an echoing solo and subsequently plays one side off the other until a quieter break finds Holland tossing off Colour Haze-style wandering fuzz leads and the trio getting altogether quieter, a glockenspiel adding to an already hypnotic atmosphere.
By the time “Discoveries” is through, it’s so easy to have been lulled to unconsciousness by it that one could easily miss the switch to “New Beginnings,” which Holland introduces on guitar, but once the track gets underway at about 15 seconds in, it’s hard not to notice the shift back to a more structured feel. At 7:02, “New Beginnings” is the longest track on Underground, but it’s not so much a departure in style from “Underground” or “Echoes Return,” both of which came in just short of six minutes. Rather, the EP’s closer rounds out the storyline and resolidifies the impact of Underground tonally while also reinforcing the spacier ideas put forth by “Enlightenment” and “Discoveries.” I won’t give away how the lyrical arc ends, but it adds to the cohesive vibe and gives a fitting conclusion — the message of which, that “the underground” is a place to survive, could just as easily be applied to the band itself, who’ve thrived in their own underground scene over the past several years — to an offering that greatly expands Trippy Wicked‘s breadth in this new era for them of self-reliance. Whatever influences they’re working with across Underground at any given point, Trippy Wicked come out of the fading echoes of “New Beginning”‘s conclusion sounding more like themselves than anyone else, and given how distant some of the brasher moves of Going Home seem in comparison (though, again, I enjoyed that record), that’s no small feat. The real question is what the three-piece might be able to do in terms of bringing the varying sides of their methodology together — I’m still waiting for some element from their 2010 The Bleak acoustic EP to show up down the line — to form something new an individualized from them, but if I’ve learned anything in following Trippy Wicked from release to release, it’s that trying to predict where they might go next is only going to make you feel silly later. What they’ve been most consistently to date is unpredictable, and Underground is all the more righteous for the fact that it was hard to see coming.
Trippy Wicked, Underground EP (2013)
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Tags: St Albans, Superhot Records, Trippy Wicked, Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight, Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight Underground, UK, Underground
