Tracks

Turquoise Feeling: "From a Buick 666" / "Pizza Lovin' Baby"

(2011)

By Kaylen Hann | 5 October 2011

More full of gnarly than the 7th circle’s middle ring, this two-track sampling from Turquoise Feeling’s forthcoming album-on-cassette, January Sisters in Drag, is hands-down some of the roughest, most cranky-pantsy garage rock I’ve heard in a while.

In stark contrast to surf-y snark or nostalgic sentiments bloated with distortion and whammy bars, “From a Buick 666” drives in with a firm stance and chugging pace, David Treneff at the wheel; guitar chords shred at the distortion in thick swipes of angry badger paws; metaphors mix; our scrunch-faced and sour lead vocalist Treneff resolutely “fuck-you”s his way through a bird-flipped gesture of a drag track. Without actually using the words “fuck you.” Spittle flying into the mic, he informs us he just does not even care: politics, whatever we’re on about, he wants none of it. And it’s all spewed with the vehement set-of-jaw of “Enough”-era J-Lo, which makes me think this guy must be going to a lot of the same parties I go to.

I feel the guy. I am a firm believer in the innate right of whining. Fussing and complaining being a survivalist necessity, these tracks are rife with venting—and the second track? While a romantic twist ensues, it sees no relief for our ticked-off and fuming narrator. All that we know of “Pizza Lovin’ Baby”s leading lady is: by gum she loves pizza and also she’s gone. After how long, who knows. For what reason? Who knows. In what manner? One could only hazard a guess. As assuredly as she loves pizza, that bitch has left our gentle/not-gentle narrator in the throes of disbelief, to which he can only muster a petulant and Melrose Place appropriate “No way!”

Now, while the more trashy rock of the garage genre may be conducive to the airing of power-pop grade grievances and non-specific sentiments like “she’s gone” or “fuck you” or just “pizza”—and at first listen they may strike you as being just as shallow of sentiments—it is worth mentioning just how flush with import this pizza-loving quality of his lady-love was to our narrator. A food-item nestled oh-so-close to my own heart, pizza is almost the second leading lady at play here. To wit: Treneff has only so recently changed the name of the band to Turquoise Feeling from previous Pizza Slayer, perhaps solely reserving the moniker for his blog project: Pizza Slayer. It’s a blog, wherein Treneff actually does deign to consume and thoughtfully, cogently review and critique pizza from every local Columbus, Ohio pizza joint. Of which I’m told there are enough to support this kind of extensive project.

I like how this sour cat rolls. And while I’m listening for the full-length cassette, released in mid-October on Nova Guarda Records, to flesh out some of these songs with more minutae and certainly more of those same Wire and Black Lips chords, albeit the cliffs notes version, I—to borrow the words of Frasier Crane—am listening. And also visiting the pie-hole across the street, twofold.