The latest solo album from this NY-based avant-crooner is an impressively wild evolution from his previous work, as Romance Wake Naming feels like a heartfelt yet feral homage to “the experimental and even hip-hop roots of industrial music.” Embracing “mangled breakbeats” and “cassette cut up experiments,” Trecka’s latest vision lands in fascinating and novel new terrain that lies somewhere between harrowing late-period Scott Walker and snarling and chaotic interpretations of New Romantic pop hits by a gaggle of insalubrious Wax Trax! miscreants like Revolting Cocks. Fittingly, one of those Cocks (Ministry’s Paul Barker) even makes a guest appearance, as does Meat Beat Manifesto (albeit in sampled form only). These songs can admittedly be quite a cacophonous and unstable concoction at times, but the best moments beautifully channel the raw and chaotic “anything goes” intensity of a great bygone era in underground music.
The opening “Rumors of Survival” provides a wonderfully churning and blown-out introduction to the album, as Trecka repurposes a mbira sample from the late Jamie Branch into a clattering, pulsing, and rhythmic ball of noise. That said, Trecka’s Scott Walker-esque vocals were admittedly a bit more of an acquired taste for me, as I have seen them previously described as “David Bowie at his most untamed,” which can be a somewhat jarring element in this particular context. I would personally go with “New Romantic vocalist with the intensity dialed up way too high to feel like pop anymore,” but I am mostly a fan, as the wailing and primal catharsis of those vocals are the heart of the album and they are also the thing that transforms these pieces into a raw, direct, and unique artistic statement rather than just a mere homage to some cool ‘80s industrial artists. Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Trecka is generally quite a cool and adventurous vocal artist, as his frayed and howling melodies are ingeniously enhanced with a vibrant host of cut-up and swooping samples and layers.
For me, the album’s biggest highlights are “Sex Pattern Death Pattern” and “The Dream Naming.” In the former, a warm bass motif and a rhythm of chopped-up breath samples anchor a sensuous and trippy swirl of flickering, chopped, and dissolving vocal layers. I especially loved how all the buried sounds were revealed in the final moments as the noisier elements faded away. In “The Dream Naming,” Trecka samples a heavy, slow-motion industrial hip-hop groove from Meat Beat Manifesto as the backdrop for an unusually melodic and understated vocal piece with a vibrant squall of roiling distortion and fragmented samples at its heart.
There are plenty of other great moments throughout the entire album as well. For example, Trecka reprises “Houndedness” from 2024’s The Bloom of Performance in impressively This Mortal Coil-esque fashion with engineer Sam Skarstand stepping up with some great chorused bass and twinkling synth work. While that This Mortal Coil-esque spell proves to be tragically ephemeral (for me, anyway), the song’s second act is cool as well, as it intensifies into a crescendo of stomping and stuttering drums and layers of frayed vocal loops. Elsewhere, “Praying to the Seams” features some psychotropically smeared and slicing high-hats, a Kraftwerk-esque synth pattern, and an unexpectedly soulful and hooky final minute. Trecka is definitely onto something good here, as this collision of blown-out industrial-damaged grooves, inspired collage/loop techniques, and feral pop hooks feels like the ideal environment for his oft-challenging and artfully uncomfortable vocal art to blossom, as this gnarled and chaotic context perfectly matches the intensity that Trecka brings to his idiosyncratic vocals.
