When’s the last time you have heard a catchy and humorous “self-referential” intro to an album? They Might Be Giants with “Welcome to Flood”? Panic At the Disco with “We’re So Starving”? Is there room for one that sounds like makeshift stadium rock? If so, “Welcome to Album Five” ushers you into what is indeed the fifth album in their fifth consecutive year of releasing.
Trademark Issues is a long-distance duo (Mitch Armbruster and Gary Hornseth) where both members tackle each other’s fragments in music, and it is all resulting in 99s flavored rock/pop reminiscent of The Lemonheads, The Magnetic Fields, Teenage Fanclub and Meat Puppets. So, if 90s flavored psychedelic rock is your kind of bag, Change this Face may be the album for you.
A good example of the duo touching upon different mixes of rock and pop is the emo-lampooning “Jack’s Gone On”, a song about a man who lost his guitar to a person who makes bland music. Another is the title track, whose lyrics, over a dreamy jangle pop sound, reminisces about being a judgmental youth dressing with the intent on fighting for individuality.
“My Current Half-Baked Theory of Stuff” is the more rawk-heavy stomper where they quote a film, Magic Tune, to draw out a personal idea of what kind of art has more importance. If lo-fi power pop is up your alley, Change This Face shall give you plenty of satisfaction. Also, feel free to listen to them and check out past works.
We asked Gary from Trademark Issues our 3 Qs:
What inspired you to start making music and what keeps you making music?
We’re inspired by all the music we’ve ever heard. We’re both lifelong fans of a huge range of artists, some we share and others we don’t. People have told us we have something of a “sound,” and we suppose that’s true. But we also like to try on different genres as they suit us. But part of what’s fun for us is trying to identify the influences in our songs that even we don’t always recognize until after we’ve released it. More than once we’ve realized months later, “Oh, I lifted that bit from something I listened to at 16 and forgot about.”
We keep doing it because we’re never quite sure where this collaboration will go next, and the surprise and delight of finding that out is way too much fun to give up. That, and we’re truly delighted and honored by the small number of fans who stumble on to what we do and like it.
What was the most challenging thing in your music (artistic) path?
As a purely DIY band doing everything from recording to artwork to promotion, everything is a challenge! But it’s all fun, too. Probably the most challenging thing for us as a band is distance. The two of us live 1,200 miles apart. And while making five albums we’ve spoken to each other directly only twice. We communicate only in text messages and shared music files. We didn’t set out to work in this way, but for now it’s part of our approach. It forces us to work and think in different ways than how we might if we were in the same room.
We also challenge ourselves to complete a full LP annually, always released on the last Friday in July. Embrace the constraints, we say.
What would you dream to do if anything was possible?
Hmm. Our dreams are pretty modest. We’ve sold some CDs and shirts, had some very nice reviews, enjoyed a bit of unexpected radio airplay around the world. We’ve gotten to know some very nice and interesting people. All of that is incredibly rewarding to us and we wring immense pleasure out of it.
But since we don’t speak directly and have never actually performed together, it would perhaps be a dream to one day do that. Maybe the opening slot on the smallest stage at a small festival somewhere, playing a few songs to a handful of people paying varying degrees of attention. That would do.
Written by mynameisblueskye
