Categories
FEATURES GUEST EDITOR

Trans Am: The Ends And The Means

TransAm

After nearly a quarter-century, Trans Am still gets a kick out of pushing buttons

After 24 years and 10 albums, we’re still trying to figure out Trans Am. A statement of misguided complication or exaggeration? Maybe. But the trio hasn’t exactly made comprehension easy considering its non-linear progression, lack of canned press statements and refusal to submit to expectation. Example: 2002’s T.A., where accompanying promo photos saw the band D-bagged up to resemble a record company-stencilled boy band. Were they ripping on pop culture’s easiest targets or poking fun at Blink-182’s poking fun of the mainstream’s musical climate, while riffing on electroclash and visually parodying REO Speedwagon’s The Hits?

“We’re a pretty reactionary band, I discovered early on,” says bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Nathan Means. “When we started playing in the ’90s, it was a wasteland of guitar-based alternative rock. Everything was kind of moody or aggressive and pretty ‘male.’ That was our first reactionary move. I don’t want to claim no one was playing with a keyboard at the time, but playing with keys in a rock band was pretty novel. And playing with a Casio was something people laughed at.”

Then, there was the on-again/off-again claim that the band wasn’t “doing anything different” musically.

“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I?” says Means. “You know, I’m going to disagree with myself. In that case, I think I was reacting to the idea of people creating something new, but 80 percent of music is pretty heavily influenced by something else, or copied. That fuels the belief that nothing is all that different and people recycle things for new product, which is new in terms of being product, but not new in terms of being new music.”

Trans Am’s throw-at-a-dartboard-and-see-what-sticks approach notwithstanding, the band finds itself with a 10th album in its laps. Volume X (Thrill Jockey) leans toward the streamlined sensibility of 2007’s Sex Change, snidely and playfully existing somewhere between krautrock, post-rock, electro-rock, punk rock and other prefix-rock. And while Means denies “Megastorm” being a deliberate synthed-up nod to New York hardcore heroes the Cro-Mags’ “We Gotta Know” (“I don’t think so, but I’m calling out [drummer] Sebastian [Thomson]; that’s one of his songs”), he will cop to Trans Am’s renewed sense of purpose and the redefinition of the band’s meaning to its members. Maybe the trio really isn’t doing anything new and none of us are obscure enough archivists to have figured it out. Whatever it’s doing, the band is doing it with a new lease on life, and for that, you can point to the business of music.

“Trans Am is a different entity now,” says Means. “Before, it was our universe, and we had a pretty steady rise in popularity over our first four or five albums. There was a sense of upward trajectory and endless possibility. Now it’s pretty stripped down. We got dropped from our booking agency a couple years ago. They said they were focussing on their ‘core’ business—whatever that means—and all of a sudden, after 15 or 17 years, we didn’t have an agent. It was like, ‘Oh wow! Now we’re just some guys who play in a band.’ It was a bummer, but it was liberating. We were just playing shows and having fun. And if we’re not having fun, we’re not going to do it. It’s kind of a lame phrase, but I would use ‘creative outlet’ to describe what Trans Am means for us now.”

—Kevin Stewart-Panko