G&P review: Trash Talk

Trash Talk
Trash Talk
Trash Talk Collective
“It costs a lot to look this cheap,” busty balladeer Dolly Parton once mused, not inaccurately, I might add. The punk rock corollary would be it takes a lot of technical savvy to sound this perfectly raw.
Belying their punk as fuck packaging and assault, Trash Talk enlisted studio denizen to the stars Steve Albini to twiddle the knobs on their eponymous third album, a mired in muck assault of dirgy punk.
Though some of their songs step up to a quicktime march, Trash Talk are at their best when they’re drunkenly lumbering around the studio in a cough syrup overdose lurch.
Trash Talk actually manage to play the low, slow and simple card without managing to sound like fellow punk mopes Neurosis or Amebix, which ought to be hailed as an accomplishment at a time when imitation is the sincerest sign of a lack of imagination. Instead, Trash Talk’s ramblings can be best likened to Apartment 213 (right about the tempo of “Kill for Christ”) or Iron Lung at their slowest (e.g. the title track of Sexless//No Sex) with just a skootch of 16-ish stomp.
Combining self-released DIY ethics with the wisdom to actually enlist someone who knows a thing or two about production to helm the album, Trash Talk’s self-titled mini-album serves up 14 minutes of quality stomp even if they do the overplayed longest-song-at-the-end-of-the-album shtick like a metric butt-ton of bands before them.
My only quibble with the album, does Artificial Peace know Trash Talk swiped their inverted peace sign logo?