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Album Review

Thomas Truax Full Moon Over Wowtown
Breakin' Beats

Article written by Ged M
Feb 16, 2004.

If you get only one thing from this review, it’s the pronunciation of New Yorker Thomas Truax’s surname (‘troo-aks’). But, like the record, you might get a lot more. It’s a bewildering melange of garage rock songs, avant garde sounds and cabaret showtunes, full of whistles, toy piano, ice cream chimes and invented instruments as weird as Sister Spinster and The Hornicator (you’ve got to love anyone who invents a musical instrument called The Hornicator!).

His vocals are an odd mix too, with shades of Tom Waits’ storytelling, Nick Cave’s theatricality and Lux Interior’s howling-at-the-moon madness. There’s even yodelling on ‘Shooting Stars’. That moon reference is significant as this is a sort of concept album tribute to the moon as it shines on the fictional Wowtown. It’s all done in a larger than life, cartoonish way, appropriate since TT has worked as a stop-motion animator on MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, among other things.

‘Prove It To My Daughter’ is a song of voodoo hypnosis, with jazzy backing and evil carnival effects. ‘Escape From the Orphanage’ clothes a Huck Finn-type story with delicate swamp rhythms while ‘Full Moon Over Wowtown’ is insanely imaginative - “nothing’s fresh as milk drunk straight from the udder” - set to a manic rock beat. ‘Shooting Stars’ has some Sandinista-period Clash touches and there’s lovely gypsy violin on the European-sounding jazz of ‘Moon Catatonia’. You get the feeling that it’s too large a world to be contained in a small silver disk.

It’s a soundtrack to a film that might never be made but the mind pictures that it conjures are so evocative that maybe it doesn’t need to be. If you’ve got a suggestive, over-active imagination and a theatrical bent you might get it quicker than most because the again-fashionable art-rock never got artier.

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