Album #1 from The Trashcan Sinatras

The Trashcan Sinatras – Cake (1990, Go Records)
Genre: UK Indie Rock

The Trashcan Sinatras are a jangly rock band from Irvine, Scotland, which is just outside of Glasgow.

From the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, the United Kingdom was the scene for a thriving, collaborative underground rock community that would have a large influence on many of the indie rock bands currently making music on both sides of the Atlantic. While shoegazing and harder rock bands were largely popular in England, their contemporaries to the north were creating softer, more fey sounding music. The sound of the Trashcan Sinatras is a hybrid of early REM and The Smiths, along with the lightheartedness of the Scottish indie scene.

The Trashcan Sinatras had a moderate amount of success both in the United Kingdom and in the US. Two singles were released of this album, Obscurity Knocks and Only Tongue Can Tell, which reached #12 and #8, respectively in the US Billboard Modern Rock list. Hayfever, a single off their second album, I’ve Seen Everything (1993), even made it onto an episode of Beavis and Butthead. Their third record, A Happy Pocket (1996) was not released in the US, and forced the band and their record label into bankruptcy. They stayed in a holding pattern for a number of years, until they released their newest album, Weightlifting (2004), to universal critical acclaim. They are currently working on their fifth album, which is set for release in late 2008/early 2009.

I came into this band about a year ago on Rhapsody, while attempting to listen to more of the UK indie music scene. I’ve always had a soft spot for UK music, which became more fervent after I studied there in the fall of 2003. Oasis’s, What’s the Story (Morning Glory) (1995), was constantly being played on my Discman, as it had been in high school, and has since been both a sentimental favorite and my favorite all-time record. So when the opportunity came to listen to a new UK band, it seemed like a logical choice.

What I like the most about the Trashcan Sinatras is that they’re not attempting to redevelop the wheel. We’re not talking about Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, or Nirvana, we’re talking about a humble little rock band. They took a sound that had been in development, for almost a decade, and found something in it to make their own. Their sound in Cake has an innocent, almost timeless feel that can always lift my mood. Combined with lead singer Frank Reader’s endearing, and often weary Scottish voice, I feel that Cake may be among the best jangly rock albums out there.

After listening to Cake and the rest of the Trashcan Sinatras work, I started to reassess what kinds of music were my favorites. I began to notice a trend that soft, jangly guitars were often prevalent, even if they were not as explicit as they were on this record. Even for records that were not light or jangly at all, the Trashcan Sinatras helped provide me with a template with which to assess other albums.

Recommendations: For an edgier, more punkish sound, Close Lobsters – Foxheads Stalk This Land (1987); for a lighter, more dreamy and female driven sound, The Sundays –Blind (1992); for a more raw, hard rocking sound, Orange Juice – The Glasgow School (2004), a compilation of this seminal band’s early singles and demos from the early 1980s; and for something more playful, Polaris - Music from the Adventures of Pete & Pete (1999).