Photo by Celia Carroll
Tron Jovi and Combustor
Tron Jovi (Martin Defatte) and Combustor: Clancy Carroll, Marc Graves, Bobby Mitchell
Last summer, Milwaukee’s Combustor released a self-titled album, a hard rocking effort by veterans of Milwaukee’s ‘70s-‘80s punk scene. A year later, six tracks dramatically reimagined by Milwaukee producer Martin Defatte (aka Tron Jovi) have been issued as Bent & Snapped: Tron Jovi Remixes.
Tron Jovi is perhaps best known in town as one-half of Guerilla Ghost, a remarkable recording project described as “socio-political noise-rap.” The collaboration between him and Combustor seems less than inevitable but was spurred when the band’s guitarist-vocalist Clancy Carroll discovered Guerilla Ghost on the radio.
As Carroll recalls, he was driving with his wife, tuned to WMSE, “and we heard this song: ‘What the hell is this?’ It was Guerilla Ghost’s ‘Steady Broadcastin’’ and it knocked me out.”
Synchronistically, Tron Jovi reached out to Carroll. He hosts a local music history site, MKEpunk.com, and contacted Carroll about bands from the city’s past. They became fans of each other’s recordings. The resulting collaboration on Bent & Snapped is a dismantled and reassembled collection of Combustor tracks, transmuting the rock band into something that recalls, without nostalgia, the darker end of trip hop. “I can’t verbally describe what it is,” Carroll says. How about astringent industrial music with hard-knock rhythms?
“He ran with it,” Carroll says of the Tron Jovi’s work on the album. “I wasn’t part of the process beyond listening and saying, ‘Is that us?’ Even the cadences of my vocals are different.” Bent & Snapped is a joint release on Tron Jovi’s label, Triple Eye, and Carroll’s imprint, Splunge. Six bonus tracks are available on Bandcamp.
Last year’s Combustor release received airplay on WMSE and Ian McCain’s “Neighborhood Watch” on 102.1 FM but “not much payback outside the 414,” Carroll says. Bent & Snapped could expand the band’s audience but no one in Combustor is banking on music as a career. “I’m just happy that this thing exists,” Carroll concludes. “Bent & Snapped is a really interesting re-representation of good material.”
|
|
For a music video from Bent & Snapped, visit Combustor - Rails Remix (youtube.com)
Combustor will perform at the Puddler’s Hall Block Party (2461 S. St. Clair St.) on Saturday, July 13; and Chill on the Hill on August 13.
