The lo-fi aesthetic circulates in five-year cycles it seems, which means Roman Psych guys Trans Upper Egypt are arriving to the scene just in time.
“CCTT”, the third cut from their forthcoming self titled record, shows that TUE bear all the markings of a contemporary underground rock n roll band: they delve across genres, hopping from psych to krautrock to synthpunk, the vocals resound from somewhere massive and nebulous–like St. George’s Cathedral if it were covered in dust–and they approach electronics with the curiosity of a child just given their first synthesizer, twiddling knobs to arrive at sounds only a broken spaceship might make, though the Holy Roman punks possess one slight height advantage that elevate them just above the noise of other psych acts: their rhythm section. Clear and pungent enough to withstand the causticity of the entrancing swarm of guitars and synths, the drummer attempts to fill every lingering empty space with a hit of the kit as though he were a younger Brian Chippendale still in high school band and unsatisfied by the rigidity of tradition and convention. Trans Upper Egypt may be riding another lo-fi wave, but they are doing so outside of the crashing barrel of obscurity.
Trans Upper Egypt comes out November 4 via Austin’s beloved label, Monofonus Press.
