It was probably not a coincidence if the DJ played Thee Oh Sees’ ‘Carrion Crawler’ just before TRMRS took the stage at the KXSC fest. I didn’t get their name first, that you should pronounce ‘tremors’, but the four guys on stage seemed to come from this same super laid-back, surf-punk-skateboard culture than John Dwyer’s band ,…. And actually a lot of bands I have seen lately.
The band from Costa Mesa have qualified their music of trash-pop, which is not a bad way to describe them, but it may as well as have been strung-out pop,… you know what I mean, a sort of music delivered with a beer-fueled energy.
Their fast and abrasive garage-rock with a lot of reverb in the shouted vocals (the singer's voice was echoing as if several of them were singing at the same time) sounded nostalgic with some 60s surfing guitar lines, but loud and complex enough to have been made after 2010. In a way, they reminded me the older brothers of the Strange Boys, with buoyant songs that can fool you with their faux-retro, but having absorbed decades of psych-surf-pop-rock, delivered with a wasted youth's energy
With their all-over-the-place layered melodies, and enough distortion to wake up anyone, they were frantic on stage, and I was amazed to see people still sitting on the lawn, not even getting close to the stage! What was that? Half of this stuff would have started a few stage diving at the Echo! May be it was the tough university life, the hard work, these USC students must have been sedated to sit still during these little surfing bombs propelled in front of their eyes. I know they started just doing what I expected during the next band’s performance, but they should have begun right there, during TRMRS’s fireworks. Whatever, student’s life will kill you anyway.
TRMRS released their debut album ‘Sea Things’ in 2010, the year they actually formed, and if there is a lot of concurrence in this crowded surf-psych-pop-punk-rock pool (at the top of my head, I would say that they belong to the same music family than the Strange Boys, Audacity, Fidlar, Ty Segall, Tomorrow’s Tulips, Thee Oh Sees, Tijuana Panthers, Pangea,…), I am pretty sure that their busy-distorted guitars will launch a real riot next time I see them.