Flashion Forward: Heavy Trash

I’ve zipped myself into a fancy silver time travel hatch through which I plan to Flashion Forward to new and unexplored regions where music and style meet: a land through which I will coquettishly zig and zag about the closets of UI’s fave new interviewees to examine the physical and psychological baggage they pack their shizzle in. Join me, won’t you?

Today, I’m orbiting into Heavy Trash’s dumpster. The rockabilly band is Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray’s sweet love child; the boys churn out a bluesy blend of alterna-country, Americana and good ol’ garage punk. Heavy Trash may be coming to your neck of the woods soon to promote Midnight Soul Serenade, their new album, which aggressively furrows virgin ground musically.

Though Heavy Trash never shied away from the complexity that eludes many straight up blues/punk purveyors, Midnight Soul brings it up a decibel or five with “rousing,” “disorienting” songs that “carries enough ominous atmospherics under a squealing guitar line to sound like the opening number of a well-thumbed pulp fiction pot boiler turned into a musical.”

Heavy Trash is exactly like that beautiful old Victorian-era (I think) couch I snagged off Atlantic Avenue a few years ago in Brooklyn. At first glance, Heavy Trash is bombastic, over-the-top and brash (the couch is too–violently hued mauve stripes on gold lion-clawed legs and almost entirely covered in ruched velvet). But, like my couch, deep down, they’re classy classics. You just might need a little elbow grease and an appreciation for dusty old treasures that creak occasionally if you plan on bringing ‘em home and making them a part of your life.

They look rather Victorian too–with their pallid skin, jet black hair and moody bedroom eyes, I expect them to start galloping across wild moors screaming for Catherine, not brandishing superannuated gee-tars and hitting the stage to just, you know, scream.

As Heavy Trash explains below, it’s not even about where you are or where you going, it’s how you get there (and of course, looking appropriately soigné en route.