BEST LOCAL ALBUM OF THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS
Pass Out
Trash Monkeys
There's an easy way to weed out the
musical heavyweights from the merely mediocre. Regular songwriters craft works
about love, loss, and universal experiences. Boring. True visionaries turn their
attention to more pressing matters: their own trials in the spotlight. Witness
the navel-gazing tunes of Van Morrison ("The Story of Them"), the
Beatles ("The Ballad of John and Yoko"), and, of course, that pop
titan Ricky Nelson ("Garden Party"). To those illustrious ranks add
the Trash Monkeys, who have not just one song dealing with the ongoing
tribulations of, well, Trash Monkey-dom, but a half-dozen. Of course the band's
concerns are a little more downmarket than hordes of groupies, intrusive TV cameras,
and piles of cash. As singer Lloyd Johnson croons over a stumbling acoustic
lurch, if you enter the "Casa de Trash," be sure to mind the exposed
wiring and don't forget to carefully hide your stash. Oh yeah, try not to step
on the blow-up doll either. "Casa de Trash" is just one of the many
country-inflected odes the group recorded back in the late Eighties, only now
rescued from samizdat cassette editions and enshrined on the Pass Out CD.
Elsewhere there's the cowpunk dirge "Puppies, Puppies, Puppies"
(delivered in a milk-curdling faux-Scottish accent, of course), the fuzzed-out
jauntiness of "Clairvoyant Housewife" (the bouncily twee theme song
to one of the many bizarre sitcoms that seem to exist only in the band's
collective mind), and the Merle Haggard-on-ludes ballad "Hamburger
Girl" (a heartfelt tribute to the greasy spoons of South Florida). Finally
compiled for a public audience, Pass Out stands as a gloriously whacked tribute
to creative genius left out in the Miami sun a little too long. It's also
thankfully still a work in progress; the second half of the CD contains new
songs from the recently reformed Trash Monkeys. If anything they seem even more
deranged with the passage of time. Long may they stagger.