Free at last!

Trona stampede to glory

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

If you've been following Trona since their inception three years ago, you've seen a band defining themselves before your eyes. Were they acoustic or electric? Depends on when you saw them. Did they have any similarities to singer/guitarist Chris Dyas's previous band, the schizo pop-metal Orangutang, or bassist Pete Sutton's old group the indie-pop Barnies? Depends on how hard you looked. Were they pure pop or a punked-out country band? Depends on what mood they were in that week. And did they want to be a big deal or keep things low-key? Depends on who you asked.

This kind of experimenting is nothing unusual for a new band, but Trona had high expectations piled on them from the start, with a built-in audience from their previous outfits. Sometimes they lived up to those expectations (the trio of energized, tuneful sets that won them the WBCN Rumble two years ago). Sometimes they skirted them with friendly but ragged acoustic sets. Trona were, of course, still jelling. Dyas suffered from various degrees of Second Band Syndrome, which at times caused him to try too hard not to sound like Orangutang. And singer/guitarist Mary Ellen Leahy, a former Taang! publicist who'd worked with bands but never been in one, was still trying to find the confidence to sing on stage. Last year's Trona debut (on manager Deb Klein's Cosmic label) wrapped up this stage of their development -- when their sounds of choice (male-female harmonies, acoustic guitars, countryish leanings) kept them from getting compared to Orangutang but started getting them compared to X. A disappointment when it was released, the debut makes sense in context: it was a little too soon to expect a knockout punch from the band.

It's entirely fair to expect one now, and Red River (out this week on CherryDisc/Roadrunner) is it. As confident as the first release was tentative, this album fulfills Trona's true calling as -- big surprise -- a pop group, but one that can incorporate the country and acoustic flirtations of old. They've even brought back some of the art/metal influence of Dyas's former life: "Know Too Well," a spooky Pink Floydian plodder with Rich Gilbert on steel guitar, sounds more like Orangutang than like anything Trona have done before. Although the first album avoided big production (for financial reasons as much as any), this one brings in just enough to let the hooks shimmer. With the guitar sound toughened up, they show fewer qualms about piling on the big, warm melodic turns. And none of it sounds like X. Well, the token punk number "Virago" does, but at least that sounds like early punk X instead of later rootsy X. And "My Own Train," a hopped-up pop/rockabilly number, treats roots rock more playfully than X did.

The real surprise is how much of a frontwoman Leahy's become. For the first time, her lack of prior band experience isn't an issue. Her voice harks back to the new-wave days when female pop singers were grown-up heartbreakers instead of waifs. Although she and Dyas split the lead vocals almost equally, she gets most of the standouts, including the likely single "Johnny Quick" (Dyas wrote its lyrics, and she gives the song some gender ambiguity by not making the appropriate pronoun changes). She also gets the album's one cover, the Buck Owens obscurity "Take Me Back Again." The arrangement is so borderline-campy, with the Kentucky accent and the old-timy guitar twang, that you resist falling for it; but Leahy's delivery, fake accent and all, sounds so open-hearted that it wins you over. And it suits the band far better than the Stereolab song ("Wow & Flutter") they covered last time around.

For the past few years Trona have avoided pitching themselves to major labels, after Dyas's less-than-encouraging experience with Orangutang (their label, Imago, went under and the band broke up). And yet the release of Red River will likely generate as much hoopla as Orangutang's Dead Sailor Acid Blues did three years ago. True, the band are on a large indie label instead of a major (CherryDisc linked up with Roadrunner after Trona signed) -- but then, their label probably won't go belly up as Imago did. Trona just got back from their first national tour, which started with a well-received show at South by Southwest, and they're coming close to the level of local notoriety that Orangutang had. "I don't feel like it's do-or-die for us," Dyas says when he and his bandmates (drummer Nick White is absent) sit down with me at the Middle East. "We just want to be bigger than we were a year ago, we'd like to get some local airplay. That's about all you can expect these days when you're a band on a small label."

"Personally, I want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone," counters Leahy. "Then I hope you look better than the guy from the Verve," Dyas answers.

The band consider Red River their first real album, pointing out that the first one was a bunch of unconnected demo tapes they'd recorded at different times. "It was cobbled together," notes bassist Pete Sutton. "You know, it was our Tattoo You -- two good songs and a bunch of outtakes." Still, getting an indie-sounding debut out of their system warmed them up to the idea of bigger production and different arrangements this time around. " . . . And we're not stupid: we realize the repercussions of the great X backlash," Leahy volunteers. "The thing about our band is that we started the same way X did. Chris was a talented musician, he knew every chord the Beatles ever played; and I was just singing along and playing stupid guitar parts. I didn't know that the harmonies I was coming up with sounded like Exene Cervenka, but I realized that once it was pointed out to us. When a band starts out you have to do what sounds good, and we were working around my limitations -- I was still afraid to get on stage."

So how'd she get the vocal confidence she has now? "The chip came off my shoulder and I realized I could do a lot more. It was probably a defense mechanism -- I always sang, I used to be in the choir, but it was a matter of getting up the nerve to do it. And I probably held off on singing because I was paranoid about my guitar playing. I basically learned to play guitar on stage, and I didn't want to be a shitty chick guitar player."

Dyas has likewise warmed up to Orangutang references. In fact, he played a reunion show with that band last winter, though hardly anyone knew about it (it took place at O'Brien's, at a birthday party for former Aerosmith staffer Julie Duffy). "I'm not as paranoid about that anymore. For a while, in the back of my mind, maybe I had to prove that I could do something different." Along with "Know Too Well," the new album's "Projecting" will probably attract Orangutang comparisons, both for its metallic guitar sound and for its progressive-rock length (six minutes plus). "Speaking as someone who's written a few prog epics, I don't really think it's a prog epic -- it's like all our songs, just longer and slower," Dyas says. "But there was one song I wrote that went way too far in that direction, and it didn't make the album. The main difference now is that I don't write lyrics the way I used to. When I was younger I'd put anything into a song; Robyn Hitchcock used to be my idol. Now I realize that I'm not going to do the stream-of-consciousness thing as well as he did."

Neither would Hitchcock put as many Western references into his lyrics as Trona do -- their lyrics often evoke country imagery even when the music is pure pop. (When the title track says, "We heard the clash miles from the river," the band are talking about a cattle stampede, not an English punk band.) "It's a lyrical fascination -- just something we enjoy, like the couple of dumb cowboy shirts I have," Dyas explains. "It comes from living in Boston, riding my bike up and down the street, getting cut off by buses and inhaling the fumes. The West is a metaphor for freedom, for all the things missing in my life." But he recalls a show that pretty much ended their country period. "We went through a phase after the first album where we were aiming for an authentic country sound. Then we played a show with Tom Leach and realized we couldn't do it as well. If we tried to be more country, we'd just sound like [X alter-ego band] the Knitters."

Besides, they see some noble-underdog status in being a rock band these days. "It's a different climate now. When Orangutang started, we happened to be the right band at the right time. I was 22, 23, and all I wanted to do was jump around like an idiot. Now you almost have to be apologetic to be a rock band. If we were trying to ride a trend, our main problem is that Mary Ellen doesn't sound like she's seven years old."

"We're still a rock band, just one that does certain country styles okay," says Sutton.

"It's still not as testosterone-fueled," Leahy offers.

"That's the difference," concludes Sutton. "There's more estrogen in it now."