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Heavy Trash
HEAVY TRASH
(Yep-Roc)
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As Heavy Trash, Blues Explosion’s Jon Spencer and Speedball Baby’s Matt Verta-Ray rock as if they’d been locked in the vaults of Sun Studios for 20 years. The guitars scratch and ring, the drums keep it flat and four — like a rockabilly annex to Blues Explosion without the sonic bombs and the mindless yowling. The Explosion are a fireball on stage, but they ain’t exactly a songwritin’ band. Heavy Trash are more nuanced, spinning stories of love and desperation. Not without clichés; then again, in modern rockabilly, the clichés are half the fun. Even the sonic signatures are cleaner, so every shiver of a quavering whammy bar slices through "Walking Bum" like the rippling beacon of a freight train crossing the lonely Delta flatlands at night. But just when they seem pegged, Spencer and Verta-Ray will come up with a surprise like "Under the Waves," a song about murder and suicide that’s got an acoustic-guitar backbone, angelic female backing vocals, and an electric solo so full of bright, shimmering tones, it might have been played by the late Robert Quine in one of his more reflective moods. If these guys had a little more drawl on their tonsils, you’d never imagine they were a couple of Yankees from Noo Yawk. (Heavy Trash appear on Tuesday June 14 at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square, with the Sadies and the Konks; call 617-492-BEAR.)
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