Trash One Out of the Can

Rip It Up, Issue 220, 1 December 1995, Page 14

Trash One Out of the Can

Wjr could search for many a day to find Wg|||an average man in the street familI UUiar with the antics of Dunedin outfit Trash, but the Southern noise peddlers certainly turned a few ears several years back with the student radio ‘hits’ ‘On and On with Lou Reed’ and ‘Telecom South’.

Last month the trio of Bruce Blucher (guitar/vocals), Robbie Yeats (drums), and Paul Cahill (guitar) released their third long player Mihiwaka, recorded in a total of 50 hours at Dunedin’s Volt Studio.

The make-it-up-as-you-go-along-approach Trash take to guitar playing will make most pop fans dive for cover. The 13 minute long, grating extravaganza entitled ‘Paper’, and the sparse, spoken word endurance test of ‘Small Fried Thing’ in particular, are mighty dastardly — the aural equivalent of poking your tongue out for 10 minutes. Blucher: "We decided to go in the studio without any set format, so it was all pretty much written in there, and that’s why it sounds like it does. It’s the direction we’ve been taking anyway. We’ve been taking a lot

more chances, having a lot more fun with it, not trying to be so formulised.” Trash make a return trip to North America early next year to promote Mihiwaka, after a brief tour in September 1993, on the campaign trail for their debut, Gritts And Butts. Blucher says the band sell a great deal more records in the USA, and are therefore quite happy to remain less than a household name here at home.

"It’s not a problem. The population here is so tiny, there’s only going to be a certain amount of people who enjoy what we do, and that’s the way it’s always been. Trash are a pretty low-key outfit, we’ve all got other things to do in our lives. Perhaps if we’d decided early on to ‘go for it’, and toured heaps around New Zealand, and hooked up a record company that could’ve given us the big push, then it might have been different. But we’re not really interested in that side of rock ’n’ roll anyway. It is important to us and we’re keen to get on with it, but we also value our other lives.”

JOHN RUSSELL