THOMAS TRUAX - MONTHLY JOURNAL
Psychoteddy / Blang Records

The inspired or contrived (depending on your point of view) idea behind Monthly Journal was for Thomas Truax to write and record a song a month throughout 2011, reflecting the personal and social changes that take place throughout a year. Such a project is fraught with difficulties creatively, and by default is bound to be something of a mixed bag – and so it is.

The album opens with wintery spoken word piece January Egg Race Dream – oddball, surreal and eerie, it’s an impressive start. Things after this are a hit a miss combo – February What Ya Doin to Me is a bland rock ‘n’ roll tune that fails to hit, while the likes of March Winds, Free as the Fireflies in May and A Gold Star for Miss July are tedious dirges. On the other hand, April Showers offers a more impressive downbeat feel, Lost On The Moon In June has a Twin Peaks soundtrack vibe, August Moon is impressively off-kilter and November in Berlin is a moodily atmospheric soundscape that is good enough to almost justify the whole project.

In the end, it’s perhaps inevitable that an album made under such specific circumstances would struggle to develop a coherent whole, especially with life circumstances throwing obstacles in the way (the death of Truax’s father, the end of a relationship, being forced to move out of the UK). Truax doesn’t explicitly reference these events, or indeed do anything to make the album work as a whole piece. Instead, the monthly references in the titles often seem too contrived, too forced, with name-drops of events like Fukushima and the August riots, as if Truax was struggling to maintain his own restrictive concept throughout. In the end, these work (or not) as individual songs, rather than the Monthly Journal of the title.

Some may miss the more eccentric side of Truax’s work here – there’s less space for his homemade instruments, for instance. This can hardly be seen as a commercial sell-out though – it’s still pretty left-field stuff by most standards. But long time fans might feel let down by this and new converts, I suspect, will be thin on the ground.

DAVID FLINT

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