The 'This Is Trust Club' EP by Trust Club

The release date for the ‘This Is Trust Club' EP has finally arrived (I'm not sure I need to remind you of the name of the band in question), as promised in my recent reviews of singles "Higher Hopes" and "Friend": both of which appear on it.

Unfortunately, of the other two constituent tracks, "Blinding" and "Figure It Out (Tonight)", the latter was also released as a single & I'm afraid so rapid fire have these three releases been & so distracted have I been, that I missed telling you about it at the time, for which I apologise to you & the band.

Obviously being on the EP gives me a chance to redeem myself  in this respect & those of you reading this are either big Trust Club fans already and therefore have 75% of the EP, or if you are coming to them via reviews in "Hot Music Live", then you are aware of only 50%..

So I'd better start by repairing my omission…. To start with I'm doubly disappointed to have not picked up on "Figure It Out (Tonight)" a couple of weeks earlier: it is quite distinct from its brethren "Higher Hopes" and "Friend" which I did spot & as such offers a view onto another Trust Club facet. An interesting & curious hybrid, it sounds like Kurt Cobain got to jam with The Police & just to make sure he didn't turn in a stereotyped performance, went a bit bluesy every so often. What you get is the economical but contorted style of his playing over a groove the latter band were famous for. Just warped enough to give it unique character but grounded enough not to lose its audience, this is Trust Club at their most taut & concise as well as sonically provocative.

"Blinding" in contrast is, as they say, another cup of tea altogether. This song, the one no-one will have heard, my failure or not, is a perky new-wavey pop tune driven pleasingly along by perhaps the most prominent bassline of a Trust Club track, aided & abetted by precise & dynamic drumming: very much in the school of their models Weezer. This song so screams "single" to me that I'm a little surprised that alone of the EP tracks, it is not so. It is however rather addictive.

Taken as a whole, the ‘This Is Trust Club' does precisely what a good debut EP should do. In economic form, it informs you in only four elements a great deal about a band whom you might not yet have heard. That's four distinctive & distinct songs, showing the range both of their creative imagination & their capacity to realise it. And it's quite a range too.

There is an EP release show at the Victoria in Birmingham tonight with Gutter Puppy in support if you can make it & at which you can no doubt hear all four tracks being played live.