THE SHY TRAFFICKER

In Minneapolis, down in Chicago, east to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, the number-crunchers had found a voice that is still going strong nearly twenty years later, and with The Shy Trafficker - a drums/bass/guitar combo relocated to Seattle from San Antonio - that tradition continues. This trio also shows a taste for jazz, sometimes even Lounge, and it's an entertaining juxtaposition. 11-cut Hard Fought,Found Thought opens on a sequence of unrelated musics involving pretty guitars and various noises, 'Romance and Sequiturs' finally getting down to business with Kenny Day's popping drums carrying the interloping guitars & basses of Mark Coburn and John Campos, a track that progresses well and becomes addictive by the end (if you forgive the lads their vocal silliness). 'Ape Will Eat Chicken' is a droner that meanders awhile, gathering momentum under gangly surf-rock morphing into miscalculations with near-disastrous results. 'Frontier' starts on some sour jazz and crawls along painfully, 6-minute 'Pitches and Creme' fumbles about before resembling what a besotted Neil Young and friends might've done in a garage 30 years ago, and catchy swing of 'Intermission' where loungelizards meet Punks most convincingly. Excellent 'Vicissitudes' succeeds in a similar vein, probably the most cohesive cut and a real accomplishment for a group of this ilk, as is 'Candelabra' and 'Uds Madre'.

Surely a band only for those already taken with the American mathrock movement, and perhaps only a handful at that, the Shy Trafficker is no Don Caballero. But then, who is?