Here's What The Media Is Silently Spewing Forth

Urbanhonking.com

San Diego, Oh, San Diego, you of such a vibrant scene in the early 90s with your Three Mile Pilots and your Drive Like Jehus and your Crash Worships and your Heavy Vegetables and your Gogogo Airhearts. You of your powerful rock'n'roll. Oh, San Diego, with your fluf and your Rocket From The Crypt and your varied alternative goodness. Oh, San Diego, you with your Jewel and Pinback and Black Heart Procession and Blink 182 that later escaped from your warm and sandy clutches. Rock the Casbah, right?? One band that escaped the warm, sandy clutches of San Diego was Truman's Water, but they didn't escape to fame and recognition, they escaped to Portland, OR and to obscurity.

When I first saw Truman's Water at the infamous Jabberjaw in LA in 1994 it was maybe the first time I realized that I could like or that I did like music that would clearly not be enjoyed by the masses. They were wild. The music didn't seem to make much sense, the instruments didn't really seem to be in tune, the tempo changed wildly, the members jumped higher than I thought possible. They were inspired by very early Pavement, but that's not really right, maybe more like a Polvo or a God Is My Co-Pilot, but only parts of those bands. Truman's Water become somewhat of an indie darlin in 93 and 94 when John Peel started pumping them over in the UK and Sonic Youth started saying how awesome they were. The indie spotlight faded and they were snatched up by a major label. They put out maybe a dozen albums between 92 and 98 with the majority of them being somewhat hard to find (cassette only or tiny labels). They hit their pinnacle on their 93 album Spasm Smash XXXOXOX Ox and Ass. After Spasm Smash they leaned more towards instrumental improvisation. They band lost it's singer Glen Galloway in 94/95 (he has later returned periodically for albums and tours) when he became a christian and formed the idiosyncratic christian lo-fi band, Soul-Junk. Soul-Junk has been putting out records since then and has slowly become probably the only lo-fi christian hip hop group ever. Truman's Water moved as a band shortly after Glen left the band to Portland. They have slowed down but still put out albums and it seems like they tour Europe (where all good instrumental improv spazz bands thrive) once a year. Truman's Water will always be remembered for always being an unrelenting and never comprising band and for their impressive diffuculty and obscurity they deserves the title The Greatest Band Of All Time. -Steve

Q Magazine August Issue 2003

3 stars Unusually coherent offering from US art-rock veterans So determinedly lo-fi that they insisted on a one-take recording policy and regarded rehearsing as bourgeois, Trumans Water emerged in 1992 sounding like a gang of tramps throwing supermarket trolleys down a lift shaft. John Peel, predictably, hyper-ventilated, but few shared his glee. A decade on, Trumans Water remain heavily indebted to Beefheart, Pavement and The Fall but have shed their more irritating art-rock pretensions. Pulverizer Bear and Meteorites For Troglodytes interrupt the typically epileptic rhythms for a cursory nod to tunefulness, while Say Hi To The Lie Machine could be strung-out, mid-period Rolling Stones. Surprisingly palatable.

Ian Gittins

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Careless Talk Costs Lives - - Issue 4 May/June 2003 Trumans Water "You Are In The Line Of Fire....." Homesleep Records

If tunes can be gold then Trumans Water are billinaires. They manage to pull more stunning tunes out of the air in one song than most bands manage in their entire careers. Huge tunes. Tunes as big as skyscrapers. The Kind Of Tunes that you can only spell out in RED CAPITAL LETTERS underlined a couple of times. The Kind Of Tunes that really ought to be spelt out IN RED CAPITOL LETTERS with the word "FUCKING" inserted between each note. That's how you would write a Truman's Water tune. This review can only HINT at the might of these gargantuan tunes cos we need a couple of pages of great big red capitol letters with snails crawling over them getting poisoned to death by the ink still evaporating off the paper, but CLINGING ON, HOLDING ON, DRAGGING THEIR DEFLATING SNAIL CORPSES OVER THESE WORDS AND FUCKING UP THE PAGE WITH THEIR BUBBLING SLIME. Tunes, y'understand?

Michael Franks

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The Wire Magazine July2003 TRUMANS WATER YOU ARE IN THE LINE OF FIRE AND THEY ARE SHOOTING AT YOU HOMELSEEP HOME511923 CD

San Diego slackers and former underground indi darlings Trumans Water lurch out of their hibernation period with a brand new album that is heaving with unknown special guests and retarded showmanship. Now completely unfashionable (and fiercely proud of it), Trumans Water can concentrate on kicking out their jams without any of those pesky in-depth interview sessions or tiresome photo shoots getting in the way. Ther groupıs loose limbed punk and improv approach of yore remains firmly in place, which is good news for their fanbase, but slightly disappointing for those who were hoping to hear something different from them come slithering out of the speakers. That said, Trumans Water remain a law unto themselves and for that fact alone we should salute them.

Edwin Pouncey

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Rocksound Magazine - August 2003 Trumans Water 'You Are In The Line Of Fire.....' (HOMESLEEP) 5/10

Over recent years there have been some ridiculous labels given to music. We've had "scatcore" (DEP, SikTh) and "spazzcore" (Napalm Death, Converge) but the "squigglycore" label adopted by Trumans Water is surely a step too far? Squigglycore appears to describe a sound that is so lo-fi and rough it is ridiculous. This is old-skool hardcore meets old-skool punk in a backstreet garage with the result being recorded on one of those crappy cassette-recorders complete with a broken Ostopı button. This is the real sound of garage rock not those shitty, major label bands who claim to have gone back to their roots only to then spend a million dollars on production. These recordings sound like shit and are all the better for it. If you want to hear the sound of garage days being revisited then this is it.

Graham Finney

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Flux Magazine TRUMANS WATER 'YOU ARE IN THE LINE OF FIRE AND THEY ARE SHOOTING AT YOU' (HOMESLEEP)

Over more than a decade of splurging fast guitar strumming and melodic synchronised shouting, Trumans Water have proved themselves to be a force for the ridiculous side of rock music. Yet again they crash meteorites for troglodytes and yammer silly of the joys of resistance. Kickin' out fired up rockin' tunes propelled by drum clatter but pulled left by tunings that make people who work in guitar shops turn blue, they capture the spark of early punk bands but avoid retrogression by cranking the weirdness levels and ditching corny rawk speak in favour of their own tower of babbling tongue and dramatic lurching spells. If your spirit is a stomach covered by airs smudgy blanket and diet and exercise have failed then a dose Trumans Water might be some kind of antidote.

Graeme Rowland

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Logo Magazine website review - www.logo-magazine.com Also appears in July Issue 12 of the Logo Magazine

When Trumans Water emerged from the fringes of America's slacker fraternity in early 1992 their brand of artsy, experimental lo-fi was endearingly tagged as "squigglecore". Blending the rough-around-the-edges recording techniques of lo-fi with improvised blasts of shock guitars, their debut recordings garnered much praise from the American Underground. Now, some eleven years down the road, and after experimenting with punk, wilful obscurity and some "pulse-jazz" they return with "You Are In The Line Of Fire..." a leftfield gathering of capricious beats and momentarily unlistenable soundbites. An intentionally arduous listen weighed down by its "look at me" arthouse roots, Trumans Water's have their moment, but on this evidence a fleeting moment it shall be.

Pete Steel

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Is This Music? - Issue 6 Summer 2003 Trumans Water - You Are in the Line of Fire and They Are Shooting At You (Homesleep)

I'm not sure where I first heard this band but you can rest assured it was in a darkened room via crackly airwaves as John Peel broadcast the curious and at times 'difficult' rumblings of this San Diego act. I've not tracked their career religiously since then - they were never exactly easy-listening - so this is a pleasant surprise as the Water and the real world seem to have met up and produced some edgy, yet very listenable alternative rock. Not that they've sold out though - 'Rock of Gibraltar' is a snarling opener too disjointed for current trends, a jerking spasming monster of a track. Never ones for the commercial line, 'Say Hi' is a noisy thrash, but as close as they get to rock'n'roll. The rest of the album, comparisons-wise, see Trumans Water draw from the great and the good of alt.rock - 'Fire vs Ice' is a jumpy Beefhearty workout while 'Joys of Resistance' would surely please followers of Sonic Youth. They've clearly moved their recording equipment out of the bedroom and I for one am happy to get the chance to listen to them in the light of day.

Stuart McHugh

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Playlouder.com You Are In The Line Of Fire And They Are Shooting At You Trumans Water

Good Lord, but there's a lot to make you wary of Trumans Water before you even stick the CD on. We are told in the press release of many things that make us fear the joyless spectre of Obscure American Indie - apparently Trumans Water used to deliberately release their stuff on cassette only, they were at the centre of a movement called Squigglecore (like, BARF) and have one of those things called a "fervent following", which normally seems to mean inadequate men shuffling in painful knitwear. Look! There's some hills - run for 'em, RUN! But hold on, we say, for 'You Are In The Line Of Fire And They Are Shooting At You' (woooooo... just look at that word count go), is largely a record that sounds startlingly fresh for a group who've been around, in various incarnations, for over a decade. Proceedings get off to a grand start, with the sharp-elbows-in-a-crowded-lift guitars of 'Rock Of Gibraltar' and 'Neither Created Nor Destroyed', which fits in well as a heartier take on the current vogue for all things No Wave, ta very much. If (deep breath) 'YAITLOFATASAY' has a flaw, it's the big nasty jams that crop up at its midpoint. As such, the album drags and could probably do with a fair few of its 50 minutes shaving off - brevity is a virtue, and all that. Still, the jazz-informed noodling in the likes of 'Meteorites For Troglodytes' and hi-hat laden dirge 'Magnetism And Good Credit' means that a Trumans Water show would feature interludes useful for hopping to the lavvy/bar, which is nice of them. Fortunately we're rescued by the Fall-y racket of 'Pony Press' and 'Trapeze Sharks', which, damnit, even feels like it might have had sex at some point in its loose, bassy life. And that's the crucial thing - in 'YAITLOFATASAY', Trumans Water prove that even the most anally retentive of Yankee indie boys can get laid, sometimes. Now where did I put that cardy?

Luke Turner

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Do Something Pretty - www.dosomethingpretty.com Trumans Water ­ You are in the line of fire and they are shooting at you (Homesleep)

10 years ago and someone like myself would have been salivating at the prospect of a new Trumans Water record. Few of their peers were making music that could hugely offend people with its raucous cacophony as much as it could inspire others to bounce up and down and scream along with the voices and squalling guitars already teeming out of the speakers. Listening to this record and that feels like a long, long time ago. Some years ago founder member Glen Galloway got all hooked up with that Jesus guy, dropped out of the Trumans and formed Soul Junk, possibly the worldıs first lo-fi Christian band. It seems like Jesus got to run off with the talent. What weıre left with is a reasonably dreary affair, everything does as a good noisy garage band should do, but thereıs none of the heart and fire that can be found on earlier triumphs like Spasm Smash and God Speed The Punchline. Even at their worst Trumans were always dangerous and exciting sounding. For a Trumans Water record to be as inoffensive as this is truly offensive in itself.

Dudley Colley

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www.brainwasheed.com TRUMANS WATER "YOU ARE IN THE LINE OF FIRE AND THEY ARE SHOOTING AT YOU" Homesleep

Over more than a decade of splurging fast guitar strumming and melodic synchronised shouting, Trumans Water have proved themselves to be a force for the ridiculous side of rock music. Yet again they crash meteorites for troglodytes and yammer silly of the joys of resistance. Original guitarist Glen Galloway has rejoined mainstays the Branstetter brothers Kirk and Kevin for recording and writing but doesn't tour with them because he wants to stay home with his family. (Kevin now lives in Paris.) Some of this album shows them at their most straight ahead and uncomplicated, kicking out the jams on tracks like the hotwired-heart opening salvo "Rock of Gibralter," "Some Things Feel Rough," and a cover of the Flesheaters "Pony Dress" that'll have old fans bouncing around and wondering how they lost track of the band. It seems to be a common problem for them, mostly because almost every album comes out on a different label but it doesn't help that their website is a little out of date. Maybe they were just too busy flooding the roads of Europe. "Rock of Gibralter" is one of their catchiest tunes and unlike Nick Cave's unrelated MOR ballad of the same name it probably isn't about to get requested by servants of government. More likely it'll remind Thurston Moore not to sleepwalk to disconnection. "Say Hi to the Lie Machine" is another fairly straight ahead rocker, propelled by drum clatter but pulled left by tunings that make people who work in guitar shops turn blue. The verse of "Airs Smudgy Blanket" even recalls "I Fall" by The Damned, and Trumans Water manage to capture the spark of such early punk bands but avoid cliche and retrogression by cranking the weirdness levels and ditching corny rawk speak in favour of their own tower of babbling tongue. This is the band that introduced a generation of indie rock fans to Faust with their cover of "Sad Skinhead," and the almost epic "When Diet and Exercise Fail" has a similar momentum of magic roundabouts spinning absurdly out of control. Is that a theremin wailing above? They get out the sax to meander and obliterate a telephone recording of a woman ranting on the last track, but as speed flags here, interest wavers. There's certainly enough of the old Trumans Water magnetic energy to keep things moving and this album is as good a starting point for the curious to step into their trip as any. There are still the more chaotic moments, like the opening of "Pulverizer Bear," which also ranks high in the celebratory demented synchronized shouting stakes. Dramatic lurching spells are neither created nor destroyed, but dangerous stunts for "Trapeze Sharks" are fun to hear. Trumans Water might be some kind of antidote for an ailing spirit, most represented by a stomach covered by airs smudgy blanket when diet and exercise have failed.

Graeme Rowland

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Journey Shoes Website Review http://www.journeyshoes.com/vip/trumans.htm Trumans Water ­ "You Are In The Line Of Fire And They Are Shooting At You" (Homesleep Records)

Lo-fi go-fly art-fight outta-sight crumbled-character quality here, all sonic debauchery and iguana popisms. Rhythmic and splashy, this is a release that will make you shudder in your seat with eager and elevated burnt-ball velouriaic convulsions until youıre compelled to get up get on up round with into the Joy Divisiony Velvety Pavementy Spy vs Spy Punky limbtwitching off-kilter dirty humerus-hammering textures. The band's reappearance after a five-year hiatus should delight those cardi-wearing longhairs who've been starved of such oblique chunkplodding: check out 'The Joys Of Resistance' or 'Magnetism and Good Credit' for the payoff. 'Pulverizer Bear' is a typically acid-dentally melodic fuzzburglin workout that features a small child telling the band who should sing the next song. Not many groups can get away with that and stay as unfashionable as this lot - strange, smiling, stinking mongrel punk fucks with bulletproof pelts that they are.

Joe Shooman

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Delivery Man - Website Review Otta Stace - www.musicworkz.co.uk TRUMANıS WATER: You Are In The Line Of Fire (Homesleep) ­

How do you like your music? Do you like it hard and metallic; punky and full of attitude? Do you want it to reach a hand from out of the hi-fi, grab you round the neck and shake you until you start nodding at the tunes that are emanating from the noise you are listening to? You do? Then Trumanıs Water are for you. It's pretty uncompromising stuff too, but you must keep your ears open. Why? Because you might miss something; and that is that there is more depth to this album than you first thought. Don't just dismiss this newie as faceless slag rock ­ it reaches back into the primordial rock soup and nicks bits from our glorious rock heritage; I'm sure I heard a bit of proto-MC5 in Say Hi To Machine, and were those ­ gasp ­ dolphin cries on it's follow-up track 'Dry Stag Mile?' No? Maybe not.

John Stacey

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The National Student http://www.national-student.co.uk/seehear/live_reviews/Noise_Annoys.htm See! Hear! | Live Review |

by James Thornhill

William Elliot Whitmore Ten Grand I'm Being Good Trumans Water

The Rescue Rooms, Nottingham - June 5, 2003

Arriving at the highly plush and extremely empty Rescue Rooms, it's hard to contemplate the utter carnage that is soon to unfold. After a sizeable wait and with the miniscule crowd having filtered into the gapping venue, a surprise occurs. On a night where nothing less than a full onslaught of noise is expected... a guy with a banjo steps to the fore. That guy is William Elliot Whitmore, peddling blues in its traditional sense. Heart-felt, simplistic in sound but lyrically moving and complex, Whitmore leaves the majority of the audience owe-struck. Closing your eyes gives you a vision of an old black man on the back porch in the deep American south, that old man could be the tragic blues genius Leadbelly. This is made more splendid by the fact that Whitmore is a young white man. These are songs of love, pain and no remorse and are highly refreshing. What comes next could not be of a starker contrast to the beauty of the opening. Up step Ten Grand who have come to tear the place down. Playing like Slint's really, really pissed off elder brother bullying small children with Ian Mackaye, intense is a little short of the mark. Ten Grand take a tune, beef it up, provoke it, kick its ass and then let it loose on an unsuspecting public, inserting f**k after each and every chord. Oddballs in rock are always welcome and you don't get much odder than I'm Being Good. They look odd, sound odd and are just plain odd. They look like they shouldn't be here and quite can't believe they are, being completely bewildered by what they should be doing with these things called instruments. But what they do is erratic, sporadic, eccentric, loads of words ending in 'ic, including fanf**kintastic. Why put just one tune into a song when 12 will be better? Why only play one instrument when you can swap and change? And why miss I'm Being Good? The answer is just don't. Headliners Truman's Water have much to live up to. Having continued from a time when Lo-Fi meant a whole different thing, they still pack a full guitar punch. Quirky punk ethic, layer with noise, then more noise, topped with noise. There simply isn't any let up of pace in every song. On record you hear the complexities of the bands sound as they find harmony in noise where there simply shouldn't be any. Live this is mainly lost in the onslaught. Despite some severely loud and entertaining guitar on stair playing and some wonderful light-switch action they simply don't fulfil their whole potential. Noise in order to fully work needs its contrast, which Truman's Water don't provide. The night acts as a kick in the balls to the over-produced, all image no substance world of today's rock. Long live the eccentrics and please, please let's 'bring the noise'.

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UNCUT - October 2003 Trumans Water - 'You Are In The Line Of Fire...' Homesleep ***

Comeback for 90's freeform indie-rockers Contemporaries of Sebadoh and Pavemnet, San Diego's Truman's Water missed out on the acclaim awarded their lo-fi rivals on account of their unwillingness (or inability) to write a hummable tune. Instead they practised a kind of freeform artcore that took Beefheart and the wilder end of krautrock as first principles. After seemingly releasing an album a week, they dropped off the radar completely - until now. Not much seems to have changed in Trumansworld. They are still as scratchily psychedelic and willfully obtuse as ever, with songs like 'Meteorites For Troglodytes' turning rock on it's side before pushing it over a cliff and recording the resulting din. Hints of melody surface now and then, but the group never allow it the upper hand over their patented harmolodic rock.

Joe Stannard

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Self Titled LP - 2001

Trumans Water - Fragments Of A Lucky Break (Emperor Jones)

The members of Trumans Water are in touch with their inner brat. Not the over educated hipster one, but the nerdy, silent one who has a great sense of humor and doesn't care what you think. Instead of looking to stalwarts like Sonic Youth or Pavement for new directions in sloppiness, art damage, psychedelia and skree, we'd all fare better mining the depths of Trumans Water's latest. Fragments Of A Lucky Break (marking the return of Glen Galloway, also of Soul-Junk) is a miasmic spiral where the most everyday outings become the weirdest. Over six years, Trumans Water hasn't cleaned up its act or mellowed out, and this counts for something these days. Abetted by noise and, most importantly, a childlike, fearless glee, the band works on that underdeveloped bridge between free jazz, Sun City Girls and its indie-rock contemporaries. If you're searching for validity in the construct, you'll be glad to find the members of Trumans Water mainlining the adrenaline and holding unholy vigil with their temperamental, improv-ish rock. If there are near-misses on any of their songs, they are as interesting to uncover as the dead-on hits. The riffing perseveres and erupts in hypnotizing spasms, in odd, rhythm-heavy jams of the most respectable and, often, non-rock (horns and vocals that blare and blurt) kind. How fragmented is it, and how lucky are they really? When the group's improvisational and compositional abilities/sensibilities are matched by its enthusiasm, trigonometry never overrules art.
by Cyndi Elliott, Magnet

TRUMANS WATER Action Ornaments (Runt)

Apistogramma (Justice My Eye)

It's tempting to try to peg Trumans Water using one of those infinitely re-arrangeable genre modules- noise-jazz, spazz-core, post-post-punk, or some such hyphenalia. Then you notice that the band's two latest releases are two-thirds of a planned trilogy, and realize the chilling truth: the future of art rock is now, it lives deep in a basement in the Pacific Northwest, and it consists of a man named Kirk and two men named Kevin. Action Ornaments and Apistogramma, despite being nominally of a piece, seem neither governed by a unifying logic nor distinctly autonomous bodies of work, but then Trumans Water've played out this game before: their 1993 four-record opus (released on three different labels) may have been conceived in a common spirit of explosive improvisationality, but what emerged adhered to neither theme nor narrative. These latest releases hit new heights of febrility, lurching from dissonant saxophone squall to quasi- melodic punk to a chemically addled take on Sun Ra's "Rocket #9" (embellished with the sound of beer bottles rolling around on a concrete floor). TW are likely drunk on their own prolificacy: having released an incredible ten LPs, eight Eps, and four cassettes in six years, these fellows either don't need a lot of sleep or don't spend much time wading through the tapes separating the gems from the dross and dreck. Maybe that's because, lacking any useful criteria for judging what a good or bad TW song might be, they've let quantity trump quality; or perhaps it's by shrewd design, since prolonged exposure to these records seems to enhance the appeal of squirrelly, lumpy anti-songs hollered in the key of Q-flat. The effects seem to be taking some time to wear off. --Sara Manaugh, Puncture Magazine, #41, Spring 1998

Godspeed the Punchline (Homestead)

Trumans Water learned a long time ago that if you trust your mistakes, you can live forever. They've retained the kernel of their oeuvre through three LPs - a goofy, schizo-rock racket, cresting the wave of jerky angular sound lately seeping from down San Diego way. But the giddiness of discovery fades. You can't make mistakes on purpose. Trumans Water is at the dawn of a new space-pop sensibility, shaping their foundering style into a lasting imprint. Now if they can only forget how to play. - Patrick Barber

...with sometime live/satellite members Stephen Kozlowski and Dylan Rice-Leary, Trumans are clearly Portland's tallest band, if not inch for inch the tallest in all of rock...--Larstonovich The Elder (And Quasi-Observant)

...Despite a receding indie-rock orthodoxy, this San Diego quartet manages to successfully navigate the waters of improv with minimal listing toward the shores of pomp or shambling into silly lo-fi wankery.--TROUSER PRESS

From A Review Of Polvo's Exploded Drawing...

Fear not, though, Trumans Water fans, there are still moments of feindish pointlessness to help you stay rhythm-and-tone deaf. Lo-fi guilt forces Polvo to slip in a piece of utterly indulgent riffery, on average, once every four songs, rather undermining any progress they might have made.

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