We Say…
Based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, Truth Club are a four-piece band fronted by Travis Harrington, alongside drummer Elise Jaffe, guitarist/bassist Kameron Vann, and the club’s newest recruit, Yvonne Chazal, who joined on the back of their 2019 debut, Not An Exit. With new members, and the new reality we all faced over the last few years, Truth Club took the chance to reimagine their creative process, working on their individual skills while ensuring to, “hold space for criticism, critique, input, and inspiration from the rest of the band in any context”. The result is their new album, Running From The Chase, out this Friday via Double Double Whammy, an album of personal struggle, collective growth and a monument to how creativity in any form is, “something that will present my strengths and weaknesses to me, no matter if I’m looking for them or not”.
The album was made with the help of acclaimed producer and engineer Alex Farrar, and the band credit him with bringing “a sense of curiosity, commitment, and experimentation to the process”. That experimental quality is obvious from the get-go, with the opening track Suffer Debt a clattering, downbeat introduction, which apparently features the sound of cymbals being over by a truck, and in its closing Wednesday-like crescendo sounds every bit as powerfully cathartic as you’d imagine that to be. From there the album slides into the recent single, and quite possibly the record’s stand-out moment, Uh Oh, a howling slice of 90s indebted alt-rock, which pairs squalling feedback with Travis’ low-strung howl as he taps into the idea of music as a balm to life’s struggles, “each day attempt to plead that little songs can outpace the pains that chase us all”. While much of Running From The Chase trades in the slow-burning and intense, Truth Club aren’t afraid to swap the lugubrious for the straight-up raging, whether it’s the punky clatter of Blue Eternal or the sing-speak slacker tones of the surprisingly playful Clover. Even though placing a song called Exit Cycle at the heart of the album smacks of disrespecting every good album sequencing cliche, the track, which features the vocals of fellow North Carolinan Indigo De Souza, is thankfully a fitting centrepiece for this grand musical banquet, as the vocals loop and cavort into an old-fashioned round, moving from initial introspection to almost giddy delirium. The band celebrated the record’s release this week by sharing the grungy Siphon, a song that’s as playful as it is hard to pin down, combining vocal yelps and unhinged distortion with a surprisingly playful lead-guitar line, reminiscent of the underappreciated ilk of flirting. or Grammatics. The record’s title track, Running From The Chase, (which, appeasing the sequencing gods after their earlier blasphemy, follows the 55-second instrumental the chase) is perhaps as close to a classic Truth Club track as they get, as it pulls off the difficult two-card trick of being both dirgy and sprightly, while reflecting on ideas of balancing personal ambition and societies expectations. It’s perhaps fitting that an album that asks so many questions about the creative endeavour, ends not with a conclusion but with an interrogation on the excellent Is This Working? Atop an almost maths-rock-inspired stop-start rhythm track, Travis’ words become almost staccato at times as he keeps coming back to ideas of inertia and expectation, “wake, worry, watch, is this working? Are you working hard, is it working for you?” It might be a record that finds it creators questioning themselves, examining their methods, evaluating their creativity, yet as a listener it’s one that answers its own questions, after all, how could a record this good not be worth making?
They Say…
FTR: For those who don’t know who are Truth Club?
Travis: Trying to thread the needle between modesty and self-mythology to answer this. I’m going to go with: A rock band.
FTR: What can you remember about your first show?
We played at this house in Raleigh called Radio Shack. A lot of the college radio kids lived there and would throw amazing shows in a comically small room. We played with our friend Kevin’s band, Less Western, and they decorated the house in the style of an “underwater rainforest”. I wore a skirt with a floral pattern and we played five songs –one of which was a cover of “I Was Born a Unicorn” by The Unicorns.
FTR: Why do you make music? Why not another art form?
It would be easy for me to just say, “idk it just feels intuitive,” but I can try harder. I think the access I had to music, specifically live music, from an early age greatly shaped my understanding of how self-expression and community can overlap. Growing up, my parents were both avid concert goers, and my dad played bass in bands around town. They would take me to parties where he and his friends played and I would watch, transfixed. Seeing them play their instruments and feeling the volume was definitely remarkable, but it was the palpable sense of joy that seemed to radiate from everyone that really stuck out to me. I asked my dad why he liked playing music so much, and he explained it as an exchange of love. When he and his friends played, they shared their love of music between each other, and with anyone else who wanted to dance and listen. In turn, the people listening and dancing shared their love of the music between each other and the people playing. The aspects of mutuality were emphasized; anyone engaging with the music was reaching toward the same momentary understanding, together. One night, my dad and his friends taught me a simple drum beat and let me play a song with them. All at once it made sense.
I was really into drawing, but grew discouraged and disinterested. I think it had to do with how that avenue of self-expression was presented to me in comparison to music. Most kids draw in their own world, it’s insular, and that’s so cool. It’s great to connect with yourself. In a classroom setting, it felt like a bunch of people doing that near each other, which is also cool. I think it was just kind of disappointing to realize that the highest level of engagement I could receive in that context was an adult saying “good job!” and hanging my picture up on a wall somewhere. There wasn’t really any meaningful dialogue beyond one about skill. After watching and playing live music with my dad, it felt hard to want to engage with a medium that felt so solitary. In music I found something that could scale to my ambition. I could play guitar in my room, connect with myself in the same way I did when drawing, but I was also lucky enough to have been shown how to bring it into a context that implicated others on the basis of collaboration and mutual validation. If art class had looked like five kids charging a canvas with a giant marker like a battering ram, another jumping from a table with a bucket of paint, and the rest cheering, maybe I’d be making some garbage paintings right now instead.
FTR: What can people expect from the Truth Club live show?
Hopefully something at least a fifth as romantic as what I described in the last answer. Kameron and Yvonne switch instruments at least once. If I’m in a good mood and/or nervous, the set will often digress into me going off on some random tangent while tuning. Sometimes it’s funny! When I’m in a bad mood, sometimes I’ll throw my guitar on the ground. I want that to be funny, but I get mixed reviews from the rest of the band. We move around, hair gets in my face and my mouth. I’ve been told we have a great sense of dynamics.
FTR: What’s next for Truth Club?
We have an album, Running From the Chase, coming out on October 6th, and then we’re going on tour for a couple of weeks starting October 14th. Hopefully we’ll come back and start working on another album. Maybe a corporate team-building retreat.
They Listen To…
Mini Mall – Exercise
Great friends from NC making some of the most wonderfully deranged guitar music I’ve ever heard. Matt’s guitar playing keeps me up at night. The whole band has such an uncanny sense of melody and rhythmic precision. They put an album out in August and this is one of many bangers on it.
ratbag – rats in my walls
I don’t even remember how this song came into my life. But since it did, I’ve listened to it, like~ 50 times. Which is a lot because this song is pretty new. It’s gripped me in a way that not a lot of other things have recently. I’m obsessed with how much texture everything has, especially the vocals. There’s something about how it builds into something that feels very expansive, you can just, like~ live inside of it for a second.
Incubus – Just a Phase
In high school, a good friend of mine burned me a bunch of his favorite CDs that he thought I’d enjoy- among them were a couple Incubus albums. I’ve been spending a lot of time again recently (while searching for my new karaoke picks) with Morning View, and in particular I keep finding myself listening to this track and thinking “damn this goes nuts!” It’s so dynamic, there are some cool time signatures going on, and the pacing is patient in the most rewarding way so when the loud part finally hits, it truly HITS.
Shlohmo – It Was Whatever
This whole album is just a comfort piece for me at this point. I discovered it when I was about 17 and have since never been away from it for more than a couple of months. Definitely in my top 3 albums ever. The extreme use of textures and off sync rhythms that sound like common everyday noises in combo with catchy melodies that eventually just all crest into a cacophony of sensation that is simultaneously disorienting and calming —- it just hits a certain spot in the brain.
Mal Devisa – Live Again
Deja is such a compelling songwriter and musician, and I always feel humbled when I listen to this album. When I listen to this song, I am reminded of what is truly essential in music. There is so much being carried in her voice and in the bassline. I was able to see her perform at SXSW back in March, and it brought me to tears.
Running From The Chase is out October 6th via Double Double Whammy. For more information on Truth Club via https://linktr.ee/truthclub.
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