Tritonic Bend the Arc! cassette
Do you remember the feeling when you were young and you became aware of something that you thought was so cool, be it the cover of a record or a toy or a movie poster or something? You spend your time obsessing over it. You do whatever needs to be done to be in a position of experiencing the coveted thing. Once it is finally acquired, you really take your time with it, trying to savor every minute of the experience. Then you receive the rude awakening of finding out that MOLLY HATCHET was nowhere near as cool as you tricked into thinking they were from Frank Frazetta’s artwork. You remember that feeling? Well, receiving this tape was like that experience with time sped up. The packaging of this cassette is so insanely cool. Gold cassettes in a black O-card adorned with splattered gold paint, all wrapped in tissue paper, inserted into a cardboard folding case which is hand-painted and stamped in multiple locations, then dipped in wax to seal it like a bottle of Maker’s Mark. This thing is an absolute work of art! Slowly, I took my time and opened and inspected every aspect of it. Preparing for the unknown, I pushed play. These are expert-level musicians playing every genre of music you can possibly imagine, changing drastically from song to song. It’s essentially the score to a musical. There’s the “CRADLE OF FILTH but it’s a slick hardcore band” song, there’s the “pirate sea shanty” drinking song, there’s the RADIOHEAD-inspired track, there’s some unlistenable garbled nü-metal that breaks into a Tibetan monk chant, there’s a three-minute-long free-jazz drum solo, there’s a laid-back elevator music jazz piano track. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. These are clearly very good musicians who are fans of every single musical genre, and this cassette shows that TRITONIC has chops across them all, but I just couldn’t possibly care less. If this sounds like it is up your alley, then I can’t believe you’re reading Maximum Rocknroll…I mean, if this sounds like it’s up your alley, there is a dissertation on the TRITONIC Bandcamp that will explain to you why you can’t just check It out online. Normally I think that’s a cool move to only have stuff available on cassette tape, but for some reason, the manifesto seems a bit self-righteous and artsy to me. The tape looks truly awesome, though.