Tropical Fuck Storm — The Minor Second

Tropical Fuck Storm albums

- coming soon: The Drones page

2018

A Laughing Death in Meatspace – 97%

This is the best and most consistent album released in the 2010s in the vein of noise rock, a return to form of psych-blues for this band that is a joy to behold. The husband-and-wife duo behind The Drones take a minor detour in a side project with a hilarious name, only harnessing their sound to be more unified and slightly less experimental in genre jumping. Still, the band lets loose the rock n roll in the demented "Two Afternoons" and "Antimatter Animals", they work over your emotions with the languid "You Let My Tyres Down" and the militant "The Future of History", they let atmosphere take control on the strange "Chameleon Paint" and abstract instrumental "Shellfish Toxin". Music that is as fun to listen to as it is abrasive and in your face, every member of the band is female with the exception of lead singer Garreth Liddiard, a timely zeitgeist for the year 2018.

Title track "A Laughing Death in Meatspace" is their manifesto on the state of the world, and it may highlight our problems as members of humanity better than any song in recent memory. "Rubber Bullies" is the most potent blast of energy, searing everything that has come before and serving as a perfect finale while screaming “Take me on a holiday / put be on an aeroplane / I want a BMW /I want to be immortal in my lifetime too.” The emotional coda on “Rubber Bullies” is the climax to end all climaxes. This album changes the landscape or rock music by combining everything that came before into a magnificent witch’s cauldron of ideas, and the aftershocks will be felt well into the coming decades.

Best Songs: Rubber Bullies, Two Afternoons, Antimatter Animals, The Future of History

2019

Braindrops – 76%

2021

Deep States - 88%

The barrage of sounds coming from Tropical Fuck Storm can be off putting which I understand- Lead man Gareth Liddiard is yelling at you with crazy conspiracy theories as the guitars played by the all women band behind him wail with noise and there are very brief respites in the maelstrom. But there is a soulful quality to this music, an actual truthful heart exists (“feel the yearning in a song like “Blue Beam Baby”). The dragging tension we may feel from them is only because nobody listens and nobody understands the state of our world, so the thoughts inside scream to get out. “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is a bold title for a song that is mostly chaos and angular guitars (check that ending), the sort of deaf echo that surrounds “Legal Ghost” as Gareth pleads his case about the future of humanity.

This album succeeds because it puts a focus to the oblivion where the last album 2019’s Raindrops sort of failed to. A tune such as “Bumma Sanger” is perfectly organized chaos, and the switch between female background singers and male shouter is quite unique to them; ”Suburbopia” is completely the women and they exceed as the sort of Greek Chorus talking directly to the audience when they say “don’t knock nothing until you try it.” The seven-and-a-half minute “The Donkey” is the best stab at a longer song the band has done yet, culminating in an epic guitar freakout but before that Gareth sounds utterly defeated in his vocal style- part Nick Cave’s angry preacher and part Neil Young’s squeaking lost prophet. Parts of the ending of the record bring TFS to a poppier future, one where a song like “New Romeo Agent” (sung by Erica Dunn) could be used a tab of ecstasy after the disaster of a party. On Deep States (emphasis on being in a particularly tweaked-out state of mind) maybe they don’t reach the heights of their debut album, 2018’s Laughing Death in Meatspace, but they don’t need to; this is quite a different sonic trip and still one of the better hard rock outfits going.