Review of Trauma Ray – Trauma Ray EP for En La Calle Magazine
By: Forrest Cook
Trauma Ray is a local shoegaze band out of Fort Worth that has been picking up steam lately, playing several shows around the metroplex. They have recently signed with Dreamy Life Records to release their first self-titled EP [trauma ray]. All of this has occurred within the band’s first year of formation.
[trauma ray] was released on CD in September and is available at their live performances, with free streaming on the label’s Bandcamp page.
This is a four-piece (two guitars, bass, drums) that has its roots in the garage, but also owes its formation to the dives responsible for each of the band’s members covorting over celebrated jukebox conversations. Trauma Ray goes well with Sonic Youth, Sleep and The Flaming Lips. The band reaches a symbiosis of harmony in static that propels their sound from a gazey-garage band into a genuine and meritable indie act.
Each song on the album takes the listener on a journey through dreamy guitar arrangements and delays, as the reverberant, steadily mellifluous vocals and pulse build into a euphonious crescendo. Themes of modern relations, regret and frustration are congruent in the gloominess of tremolo. Distorted reverberances echo the bittersweet doldrums of everyday existence—those doldrums that seem to follow some of us more left-brained individuals like a plague.
[trauma ray] consists of four tracks clocking in at nineteen minutes and twenty seconds where experimentation in consonance seems to be the nature of the game. Albeit spacey and experimental, the songs possess a certain unity in structure, suggesting a musical mind meld congenital in any band with longstanding aspirations. It becomes obvious that these boys like to play shows together, that each member is on the same mental plain, and the music follows through in accordance.
Someone said Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is the perfect album to hang upside down in your closet and get high to—Now, I’m not comparing Trauma Ray to the recently voted best album of all time—I’m simply curious what that person might have said about this record.
You can find Trauma Ray’s latests release on Dreamy Life Records label on Bandcamp at
https://dreamyliferecords.bandcamp.com/album/trauma-ray
