Trophy Scars and the Holy (Vacant) Trinity by Lucas Rossi

Trophy Scars and the Holy (Vacant) Trinity

by Lucas Rossi. Illustrations by Bob Otsuka and Lucas Rossi

Have you ever found yourself overwhelmingly attached to the opening songs of one of your favorite albums? The first few tracks of an album frequently occupy a special place for fans of the work, largely by virtue of their familiarity. Often the best way to gauge your interest in a new album is simply to put on the first track, and to listen on if something catches your ear. If you were to do this with an album called Holy Vacants (released in April of this year after months of struggle with financial and label support), by a band called Trophy Scars, this is what you would hear:

Echoing guitar strings plucked with the emphasis of intermittently falling rain, a muscular whisper entering above them with the rest of the subdued instrumentals. Our reflective but almost breathless speaker recalls the disturbing and perplexing image of his lover “feasting on the body of an angel in a taxi cab.” The quiet ending of the first track then explodes into a raw, aggro-blues guitar riff soon joined by drums pushed up high, beating at your skull, a rising horn section, and a hauntingly soulful chorus of female voices. These sounds are the fiery nightmare that is the “Qeres,” a song named after a mythical substance rumored to be the only method of killing an angel. The horror movie violence is more than just symbolic, then; the apparent lovers in these songs actually eat angels. “Archangel” follows, evidently sticking to the theme, yet what emerges is strikingly distinct from what preceded: a sickly-sweet love song, with crystalline piano accompaniment to sappy lines like “Every little kiss that I give to you, is cause you’re beautiful,” but a love song that bares its gnashing teeth as our lamenting narrator howls “The only thing that haunts me is your quiet sobbing and time.” With that the opening suite of Holy Vacants ends and this monstrosity of an album kicks into its full stride. Noisy, jarring, intrusive, and above all confusing; all suitable ways to describe these sounds in isolation.

Here, then, is the monstrosity in its humble context. Trophy Scars began as a what would most accurately be described as a post-hardcore band. The eclectic Alphabet. Alphabets, released in 2006, was arguably the height of their use of the style and reflected some of the best qualities of the genre in its simultaneously cult yet relatable appeals to youthful anger and love. Three years later, the band released a full-length follow-up: Bad Luck. Something very strange, however, had happened in the interim. Trophy Scars had become an experimental blues-rock band. The angsty punk shouts of frontman and conceptual architect Jerry Jones metamorphosed into a throaty, Tom Waits-esque growl. This also wasn’t the teenage/young adult experience of Alphabet. Alphabets, and it remained to be seen whether the band could find similar success in a new approach. Fans didn’t have to wait for a new full-length to find the answer to that question; it came a year later on an EP entitled Darkness, Oh Hell. Darkness is where the story of Holy Vacants begins in earnest, and where this portrait will begin to zoom in.

Darkness is the first entry in what Jerry Jones would ultimately describe as a loose trilogy culminating in Holy Vacants. Darkness burst mature into the caustic blues that was only nascent in Bad Luck, at times brazenly confident and full of machismo and at others entirely terrified and crippled in its use of haunting vocal samples and depictions of absolute personal loss and despair. “Qeres” is a refinement and distillation of all the unholy anger on Darkness, even echoing in its eerie imagery of possessed human mouths of Darkness’ drug-induced freakout highlight, “Trazodone.” Never Born, Never Dead, another six track EP released the next year and the second in the collection, was a stunning and poignant repudiation of that darkness. Though it mirrored the structure of Darkness, it embraced the infinity of love over the infinity of suffering. It steps the furthest from punk anger of any Trophy Scars release, and is the most immediately pleasing and at times the most heavy-handed and drippingly sentimental. “Archangel” undoubtedly blossoms out of perhaps the loveliest of Trophy Scars love songs, NB, ND’s “Angels,” ascending to a higher plane in the angelic hierarchy of desire and longing.

These two releases, in conjunction with Holy Vacants, operate roughly as concept albums individually and on a larger scale constructed by the aforementioned wizard Jerry Jones. Darkness arises out of the purportedly real events of a drug and heartbreak-riddled summer. NB, ND is an exploration of reincarnation and love beyond death. Holy Vacants is, as stated, a winding tale of two lovers feasting on and subsisting off of angel blood, finding eternal youth but losing passion, born out of fringe superstition and an unused movie script, an admittedly ridiculous yet endearing blending of the themes that preceded it. Unsurprisingly, the inspiration behind each of these is the simple romantic love. Perhaps more surprisingly, Jerry attributes that inspiration to a single person (an ex-girlfriend) who he considers a muse. The concept of the muse has been admired and practiced in the past but in the present day, just the idea of three albums worth of equally tortured and transcendent ramblings on everything from getting ice cream to murder directly arising out of one fleeting relationship comes across as more creepy and troubling than inspiring. It needs further justification.

Jones’ style and half-found-half-invented mythology are strikingly unique (and certainly off-putting if you lean towards an appreciation of the subtle), yet their lineage extends far deeper than one might expect of a band of Trophy Scars’ meager stature. A New Jersey group making blues-influenced music and titling albums ‘Darkness’ cannot help but bring to mind Bruce Springsteen, his 1978 release Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the ease and artistry with which he envisioned the passion and lingering darkness of the everyday, an artistry and vision blown up to bombastic and absurd proportions by this distant successor decades later. Reaching far beyond easier comparisons like Springsteen and out of music entirely, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats comes to mind, for years equally obsessed with his muse in a woman named Maud Gonne. Out of this obsession came not only your conventional love poetry but also the expression of the morbid and the occult that fascinated Yeats’ imagination, much as cannibalism and angel blood fascinates Jerry Jones. Yeats, in doubtlessly charming fashion, fantasized about his love’s death and wrote her a poem about it. Jerry, in even more horrifying fashion, imagines the act of killing itself. Neither can untangle death and love, though they have a much different sensibility of the grotesque. Yeats writes, “Were you but lying cold and dead / And lights were paling out of the West / You would come hither, and bend your head / And I would lay my head on your breast.” Jerry screams, “I slam my foot on the brakes going eighty, every vacant behind exploding. I lift your face off the dash, you gurgle and spit then you ask.” Though the music in Yeats’ language is self-evident, and Jerry’s needs the fury of his growl and the rhythm and rev of a distorted guitar behind it, there is a harmony between them that reaches through an entire century and touches Holy Vacants with the intimacy of an ancient grave next to one freshly dug.

These are the observations, on my part, of an admirer. In the estimation of unmoved, unconvinced, or otherwise unimpressed individuals monitoring taste in the opinion-vortex that is the internet, Trophy Scars are simply one among a endless ocean of post-hardcore-turned-something-else bands, each project a passing wave of gimmickry that sweeps up a few impressionable minds who happen to be particularly susceptible to their charms at the given time. In light of such criticism (which I honestly cannot dismiss), my comparison between an underground rock band and monumental cultural figures looks juvenile and pretentious. Yeats is a timeless poet, firmly entrenched in the imagination of artistic canon. A volume like The Tower is a ‘classic’ text. Bruce Springsteen is an enduring American icon, and an album like Born to Run a ‘classic’ American recording. In comparison, Trophy Scars’ work, with the shaky grandeur of an album Holy Vacants, is one big B-movie, an undignified and cheap production with hardly enough of a following to ensure that it will last out the decade.

The past is filled with works of art embraced in consensus and canon. As music especially continues to expand and diffuse rapidly through new channels of expression, to grow away from monolithic cultural trends, it gets harder and harder to come to a consensus on what constitutes a classic and timeless album. It seems that that limits all that Holy Vacants, and countless other albums, can ever be at this point: a small part of too great a whole to amount to anything more than eventual pointlessness. To unapologetic fans, however, Trophy Scars is that one thing that most people like to believe their treasured artists to be. They are “something more,” a delectably frustrating, vague, and empty expression. But that emptiness deserves savoring. What is the “something” here? Loud and gaudy blues garage rock. Some guy yelling and crooning about his angel-eating girlfriend. Predictable climaxes accented with easy platitudes. Nothing at all. What is the “more?” History and legacy, funneled down from past giants into a violent, vibrant microcosm of experience. All the little tensions and pitfalls of mainstream and marginal expression condensed into the reckless energy of pounding drums, wailing organs, growled and sung appeals of unshakeable weight. Timeless ideas and feelings that explode in a moment of the intensely personal, and then disappear. Nothing, that is all.

Each release in Trophy Scars’ holy trinity ends centered on a singular refrain, a mantric chant delivering the album’s emotional climax. Darkness echoes with the despair of being trapped forever in a restless hell: “These pills don’t help me fall asleep, these pills won’t make me fall asleep.” NB, ND affirms the opposite, being secure forever in a restful love: “If I told you that I remember, would you ever believe? I love you so much more than forever, but now it’s time for sleep.” In Holy Vacants’ “Everything Disappearing,” those two infinities join and erase each other, leaving a weighty nothingness, a meaningful silence, a holy vacancy. The refrain is the simplest of all: “You’re not alone, you’re just lonely sometimes.” The character’s voice rattles, in death, that the feeling of loss and emptiness in the beloved is only a temporary illusion, not truly being alone. That realization may be key to the value of all of our most personal albums, precious songs doomed to flicker out largely unnoticed, leaving only the weight of their silence as a reminder that the void need not be lonely, that there is meaning in the space they held, however brief.

NoFi