Trapt - "Only Through the Pain"

Trapt - Contagious (Warner Bros. 2008)

Trapt - Only Through the Pain / Warner Bros.

I can see the look on your face now. Even if you don't already know who Trapt is, that "Warner Bros." tag right there at the top has you suspicious. This is understandable for a blog that often features artists flying well below the sociocultural radar of sonic change. But we pride ourselves as much on being open-minded as on being forward-thinking here at Audiversity, and just like our comprehensive reviews last year of Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem, sometimes seeing the future of music requires looking beyond the college radio circuit. So we finally have an answer for you, Ronnie: Yeah. We've signed with the majors. And it feels fucking amazing.

Trapt have been in the game for over a decade now, but their real mainstream breakthrough came in 2002 with the single "Headstrong" and a chart-topping success in their self-titled major label debut (though they had produced limited runs of two earlier albums, Amalgamation and Glimpse, for fans in their early days). Released in late 2005, follow-up Someone in Control was by and large a disappointment as the band retreated to the same tactics that had won over so many fans the first time around. In fact, by consolidating their position in the alt-rock kingdom, Trapt hindered their own chances of making a definitive career statement. They were - ahem - trapped by the decaying structuralist pillars of post-grunge over which they had no control. That ends here. Trapt have a new statement in post-structuralist theory, a new discourse to shape the reality that is modern rock radio. That statement has arrived, and it is Only Through the Pain.

The basic tenet of post-structuralism, of course, is that we see what we're taught to see in what we learn. And what we learn is shaped by the realities we experience. Theory becomes reality, vice versa. Chris Brown, Peter Charell and Aaron Montgomery have learned and experienced enough of broken hearts and the music business, and they're fed up with it. This album signals an alteration of the orthodox, the grand narrative of grunge that has been falling with all the art of a V2 in a Pynchon novel (beautiful for sure, but ultimately self-destructive). The band are actively aborting the mission, attempting to break with this well-known and much-abused narrative of determinism. They are their own social process, a new breed breaking with the distorted conventions of three-minute pop songs cloaked in bad lyrics and full of misguided fans screaming "Add me back on MySpace and I'll love you forever!" as they throw up another worthless set of devil horns. They are changing History as we know it. 180 more degrees and Kurt Cobain has turned right-side up once again. This is the watermark.

It's also Trapt's own personal Waterloo. Chris Brown has tried to force every variation of the word "fuck" onto past albums in search of Authenticity, but as songs like "Black Rose" prove here, Only Through the Pain is unequivocally strongest without them. When Brown swears now, he's swearing because there is no choice, because no words are left, because he actually means it. This is not a generated pastiche of every alt-rock hit from the last ten years. This is different because the mentality behind it is different. Trapt has cut the wretched excess, the pretension, the utter absurdity of both its early material and their (former) contemporaries and broken new ground. It is a career epoch, the sound of Columbus finding the West Indies or Marco Polo reaching the end of The Silk Road. It's also the sound of Baudrillard dying of typhoid.

"Who's Going Home With You Tonight," the first single, is arguably a career highlight. Though it sounds suspiciously familiar to long-time fan-favorite "Use Me to Use You" on cursory listens and has already invited criticism because of that, the nearsightedness of being unable to see the forest from the trees is evident to those looking for retreads of previous career stamps - This is a song that breathes new life into eighth-wave grunge just when you thought the next Three Days Grace single was all you'd had left to live for. Though not as willfully spectacular as "Contagious" featured here, "Who's Going Home With You Tonight" is a stirring raison d'etre that will have you hitting repeat until your CD player is broken. Assuming people still use those, that is.

The 14-minute untitled bonus cut that's hidden on the promo tracklisting is the ultimate display of power and passive-aggression. This is a total red herring and that may be why we haven't posted it here; not being representative of the album sonically (though thematically it is another beast altogether), this hidden track displays all of Trapt's strongest points without actually saying anything. They have moved beyond the traditional definition of "text" and embraced Derrida to produce what may be the best song in their dense catalog, a bewildering instrumental pastiche of detuned downstrokes and pedal pyrotechnics that produces as spectacular a climax as anything you've heard in the past year. Actually, maybe it's better we haven't posted it; this song deserves to be heard by more than anyone earthbound. We are not yet ready to appreciate its subtle nuances and arcing dynamic shifts.

Five of the songs are already available through the Fancorps even though this album doesn't come out until July 9th after originally being slated for September 18th. Sort of an In Rainbows syndrome in reverse (or, to use a better recent example, The Odd Couple), Trapt has cleverly opted to heighten fans' expectations for this album by leaking finished material as early as possible. That is only the beginning of a much grander statement, of a much larger adjustment of the status quo. This is a revolutionary album in disguise that will likely suffer through a quick dismissal by the traditional media outlets and music "fans" alike. That is their loss. Only Through the Pain is divorced from five-star ratings and tired comparisons to Chevelle because it sees the world not through stars or dollar figures or even a level playing field. It sees reality in 28 dimensions, a peach in the mind of Stephen Hawking. It is a brief history of the world as we will know it. Trapt are ready. Why aren't you?