Rachel Trachtenburg has been in the music biz for most of her life. There aren’t many indie rock stars who played drums in a band at six, and can boast an appearance on Conan before the age of ten (feats she achieved with her family’s band, The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players). Trachtenburg’s latest project is Wooing, where she is joined by JR Thomason on guitar and Rosie Slater on drums. Wooing self-released their debut EP, Daydream Time Machine, on cassette a while back, but now it’s getting a proper release (including a 7″) from the folks at Ba Da Bing Records.
There’s a volatility to opener ‘Tear World’, which is all moody psych vibes and bursts of squealing guitar. The song was inspired by the documentary film Blackfish, written from the perspective of a whale kept in captivity, outlining the personal hell we have devised for these animals for the sake of our own entertainment. The track ends with some pretty lonely sounding whale calls, which adds extra weight to the lines from earlier in the song.
“Do you think the children can hear our screams?
It’s enough to make their ears bleed”
‘In Colour’ opens in the calm of the aftermath, although pretty quickly perks up and morphs into a swaying pop song. But there’s an uneasy edge here too, due to the fact of the song’s equally interesting subject matter. This one leaves the whales behind, and instead focuses on LSD experiments carried out on housewives in the 50s. Everything sounds kinda drunk and woozy, and there’s something almost creepy about the repeated line “I wish I could talk in technicolour.”
Final track ‘Two Can Keep a Secret’ is perhaps lyrically the most focused and personal on the record, at times gentle like the bedroom pop of Frankie Cosmos. But things are elevated by bouts of bombastic psychedelic instrumentation, the story of the end of a friendship distorted with a weird emotion.
You can get Daydream Time Machine now via on 7″ vinyl or download via Ba Da Bing Records.