Alicja Trout – Page 2 – Memphis Flyer

The Midtown Memphis music scene has long been an incestuous network. It’s almost hard to find prominent musicians who haven’t worked together at one point or another. But one of the more interesting pairings in this world might be Robby Grant and Alicja Trout, who co-front the underrecognized indie-rock quintet Mouserocket.

Grant made his name on the local scene as the frontman for ’90s notables Big Ass Truck but has lately recorded most of his music via the somewhat-solo project Vending Machine, a home-recording-oriented “band” in which Grant tends to write quirky, dreamy songs about subjects such as his wife, kids, and home life.

Trout became a major player on the local indie/punk scene via the synth-rockers the Clears and, later, as a co-conspirator (alongside Jay Reatard) in the ferocious Lost Sounds. More recently, Trout’s signal band has the blistering power trio River City Tanlines. In Mouserocket, Grant and Trout meet halfway: Trout tones it down, and Grant amps it up.

“The whole pretext for me was that I wanted to make a lot of noise and play guitar and not write songs,” Grant says. “I think Alicja turned to me one time at band practice and asked, ‘What song are you going to do?’ So it’s kind of morphed into that. But what I like to do in this band is play really loud guitar and sing really loud.”

Mouserocket started out, a decade ago, as a Trout side project of sorts — an outlet for lighter, poppier, more playful songs that didn’t fit her other projects. But it’s developed over the years into a classic, collaborative band.

“Here you can bring a skeleton of a song, or less, and make something,” Trout says. “Everyone can come up with a part. It takes a lot to get to that point, but it’s a true band. The sound isn’t determined by the songwriters.”

The band members who have coalesced around Trout and Grant include former Big Ass Truck drummer Robert Barnett, cellist Jonathan Kirkscey, and bassist Hermant Gupta. Barnett also plays with Grant in Vending Machine, and, in a Midtown landscape where there seems to be a handful of talented drummers who serve an entire scene, he stays busy, playing with Rob Jungklas, Hi Electric, and a jazz trio with guitarist Jim Duckworth and Jim Spake.

“He probably plays in more bands than any of us,” Grant says.

Kirkscey plays in the Memphis Symphony Orchestra but lately has been bringing his classical chops to the rock world. Gupta, alone among his fellow Mouserocketeers, is a one-band man.

With its members involved in so many projects, Mouserocket is not the type of band that practices regularly or lives together in a tour band. But everyone agrees that, with a familiarity born out of a decade together, the band thrives on its looser framework.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t play a lot together, but we’ve played together for a long time,” says Grant. “We’re not a band that practices once a week and that practices our old songs. We can play shows and come together without that.”

“Our shows are boring if we practice too much,” Trout says.

This fruitfully ramshackle quality is reflected in the band’s new album, Pretty Loud, only its second official full-length release and one that was recorded over several years. It features new versions of several previously recorded songs — two from Mouserocket’s past (“Missing Teeth” and “Set on You,” previously poppy rock songs here gone electro and country, respectively), one from Vending Machine (“44 Times”), and one from Trout’s solo project Black Sunday (the epic “On the Way Downtown,” which richly deserves a second life).

Along the way, the album presents a sonic variety — especially in guitar sounds — perhaps unique among Grant’s and Trout’s myriad projects.

“That’s probably a result of it being recorded over such a long time in so many different places,” Grant says of the variety. “But I love that about it.”

“What are you supposed to do when you’re a songwriter and you record a song on a seven-inch that sells 300 copies or whatever and then you record a better version with a band that’s playing live?” Trout asks about reusing old songs, particularly “On the Way Downtown.” “Black Sunday is my solo thing, but if I’m playing [that song] live and the version is totally different, I think you have the license to record it again.”

If Mouserocket has, at times, been secondary to Grant’s and Trout’s other musical outlets, now the band seems to be moving to the forefront. As the father of two, Grant isn’t as free to tour (or as interested in touring) as he was in his Big Ass Truck days. Trout, the mother of a six-month-old girl, is in a similar place.

“For me, when I was in Lost Sounds, it was very stressful, and I needed this band to remind me that music was fun,” Trout says. “I’ve put it on the backburner because touring was taking up so much time. Now that I’m not touring … You know, having a kid has given me less time in some ways, but it’s given me more time to think about [my music].”

To watch her on stage today, it’s hard to imagine Alicja Trout as a proper St. Mary’s girl from the manicured environs of East Memphis. But that’s where it all began. First St. Mary’s, then boarding school, then the ivy-covered walls of Rhodes College, where she studied philosophy and art. And then one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Ms. Prep School decided she wanted to be a rock star. She revved up her image as easily as she might craft one of the cool art figurines she used to make so very well. And let there be no doubt, a “rock star” is what she became. Not a “musician” or “scenester.”

She hit the stage fully grown, with the look, the voice, the moves, the chops, and — perhaps more importantly — the attitude. From her earliest days as a black-PVC-clad goddess in the new-wavish trio the Clears, she was a showoff navigating a course between Kate Bush’s ethereal warbling and the gutter-bred growl of Joan Jett. Over the last decade, she’s exchanged the S&M look for battered jeans and trashed concert tees and has evolved into the most versatile and prolific female performer in the big boy’s club of Memphis rock-and-roll.

Alicja Trout

In that same period, Trout has lent her talents to Mouserocket, the Lost Sounds, the Ron Franklin Entertainers, the C.C. Riders (with Jeff Evans), Nervous Patterns, the Fitts, Bare Wires, Destruction Unit, Black Sunday, and, until the death of ’60s psych pioneer Arthur Lee earlier this year, she even played with Jack Yarber and Ron Franklin in the newly re-formed version of Love. For reasons both personal and practical, Trout now focuses the majority of her energy on the River City Tanlines, a powerful, rhythm-heavy garage-punk trio whose singles comp All the Seven Inches was, perhaps, the most heavily rocking Memphis release of 2005. The Tanlines’ newest CD, I’m Your Negative, is more cleanly produced, showcasing all the subtleties that sometimes get lost in the crush of this little band’s big, big sound.

“After a period of time, you stop worrying about how you look,” Trout says of the time she’s spent as a feminine centerpiece in Memphis’ overwhelmingly male rock scene. “You’re playing like the boys, and you just don’t give a fuck. It may sound backwards, but when you stop caring, when you don’t care at all, when you stop worrying about being judged for how you look or whether or not you play a certain way, it feels good and it is good.

“When I decided to pick up the pieces after the Lost Sounds [broke up], the River City Tanlines is what worked,” Trout says, explaining why, with so many musical projects to choose from, she’s devoted so much time to the trio, which pairs Trout with the veteran local rhythm section of bassist Terrence Bishop and drummer John “Bubba” Bonds.

“For starters, this band picked everything up so fast. We had good energy — and I mean literal, physical energy, not ‘cosmic energy.’ And it’s practical because with gas prices so high, and renting vans, it’s a whole lot easier to tour a three-person band than a five-person band.”

River City Tanlines

Trout says she hates the term “garage-punk” but uses it to describe the Tanlines because, if overused and imperfect, it gives people at least some general sense of what to expect. “Punk doesn’t work,” she says, expressing a frustration with the nomenclature of various guitar-rock genres. “Even rock-and-roll doesn’t work.” Attempting to define the Tanlines’ sound, she says, “I don’t know. We’re not limited.”

Comparing I’m Your Negative to All the Seven Inches is a case of night and day. The singles collection, raw and raunchy, sounded like a live show by Southern cousins of the Ramones and the Stooges. I’m Your Negative is a technically clean studio product highlighting not only the band’s punch but also its simple punk virtuosity.

“If you try to do your live sound on an album, it doesn’t hold up, and it gets monotonous,” Trout says. “I wanted the songs on I’m Your Negative to jump around [among] a lot of different styles. It’s more poppy at times. It hints at a return to all of the music that originally appealed to me. The melody is simple.”

Trout really doesn’t care what anybody thinks anymore. And it really does seem to be a good thing.

“With this CD — for the first time ever, I think — I really don’t care what happens with it. Because I’m really happy with it.”