Fast
Stories... From Kid Coma By Adern Tepedelen
Ignore the little sticker that will no doubt be plastered on the cover of
Truly's new record saying something like "featuring former members of Soundgarden
and Screaming Trees!" Tear it off, throw it away and pretend you never saw it.
The music on Fast Stories... From Kid Coma has nothing do do with those
bands. In fact, it's about as far removed from anything currently on a major
label as you can get. This shit's weird. It's disturbing. It crawls and slithers
like a nightmarish, hallucinogenically inspired centipede. Oddly enough, it
is this ugliness that makes it so strangely beautiful and completely entrancing.
Anyone familiar with Truly's previous two EPs on Sub Pop should be warned
that Fast Stories is nothing like their previous material. Though their
last single "Leslie's Coughing Up Blood" is included, it feels somewhat ordinary
and out of place amidst the miasma of bizarre and wonderful songs it's stuck
between. Truly combine psychedelia and grunge like Syd Barrett combined LSD
and his own sweat. They utterly immerse themselves in multi-layered washes of
drop-tuned, jagged guitars and Doorsesque keyboards, mesmerizing the listener
with swirling melodic passages and flourishes, then bludgeoning with a crush
of pounding guitars, bass and drums.
The 13 songs are all long, and for the most part, complex. Together they form
a dense, dank tangle of noise that is made penetrable by glimpses of melody
and arrangements that allow the listener access, only to be ensnared and engulfed,
swallowed whole. Fast Stories... From Kid Coma successfully brings together
a musical combination of a carnival, freak show, haunted house and insane asylum
and for over 60 minutes celebrates this achievement with demonic glee. Not necessarily
evil but frightening nonetheless.
(Raygun, June-July 1995)