The funny thing about Trans Am's shiteness is...

Beware of Chicago post-rock. At least you won't do it again.

'emotionless, rigid, cold, boring machine' - I always liked Robert Palmer, do they sound anything like him?

Machines are fine things. Hurrah!

Beware of Chicago post-rock.

Trans Am are not from Chicago.

I concur with hstencil: know your locale before you make a sweeping generalization.

In other words: " Watch out for Washington, D.C. post-rock"

TRANS AM are a good band. Their albums are very...TRANS AM. Their live shows are great stuff. They are nice guys.

no, dave q, they don't. i think Lightning Bolt's made them obsolete anyway, to tell the truth.

And now there is a neu Trans-Am clone on the D.C. post-rock scene. They're called 'LU' and they're not bad actually. but I'm partial to that sound.

LU has something to do with 90's slumberland/spinart band lorelei, i haven;t heard their album though. Trans Am, seem to be for the most part kinda boring

Their early live shows and their first album were both a lot of fun-- indie nerds having tons of unpredictable deadpan fun with the trappings of both po-faced electronic music AND balls-out rawk. And then they turned into po-faced indie/electronic nerds who would never go "balls out" anything unless it was in quotes. (Not that balls- outness is a fail-safe qualitative measure of anything, but it certainly can be fun.) Now their music sounds very careerist in an odd way: Before they were making something kind of new, and now they seem to be simply making more of what people who liked them at first expect. But they must be given respect for a first album that's still a lot of fun, and for helping a multitude of US indie boys get over their fear of synthesizers, drum machines, and so on.

Remember: Fun. That's the key word here.

I wouldn't have anything to say about them if a very good friend of mine whose tastes I usually share hadn't made me listen to Red Line and kept going on about them. And he's supposed to be the punk, while I'm meant to be the guy who likes experimental stuff, supposedly.

go listen to This Heat's Deceit and you'll find much more similarity to The Red Line then Kraftwerk and/or Daft Punk. But then again, This Heat may/may not be considered more experimental/punk than either of the above.

for helping a multitude of US indie boys get over their fear of synthesizers, drum machines, and so on

New Order took care of that problem a long time ago.

for helping a multitude of US indie boys get over their fear of synthesizers, drum machines, and so on

New Order took care of that problem a long time ago.

Not DC indie kids. Girls Against Boys more or less literally had to leave town to be able to do that sort of thing.

Indeed? Ugh, how depressing.

i listenedt o future world and kinda liked it.......but i *love* chicago post rock........

But Trans Am are not now, nor have they ever been "Chicago postrock." On their first album, at least, they were still very much ROCK.

Funny story: Several years ago I ended up buying a cheap Casio keyboard to futz around with at home. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that most of the synth sounds/loops on the first Trans Am LP came directly from this dinky little $50 mass-market machine, with no tweaking or doctoring of any kind. As in push one of the preset buttons, plug in your guitar, and you ARE Trans Am. Now that's appealingly cheeky. But then again, unfortunately, it's too good a trick to repeat.

re: "go listen to This Heat's Deceit and you'll find much more similarity to The Red Line then Kraftwerk and/or Daft Punk. But then again, This Heat may/may not be considered more experimental/punk than either of the above."

I heard This Heat's 'Paper Hats' on a fantastic Rough Trade post-punk compilation belonging to the aforementioned friend (as I said, he usually has excellent taste) and I totally adore it. 'Deceit' seems pretty damn hard to find in Melbourne though. I don't quite understand that last sentence, but I suspect that despite how groundbreaking they both are, the music of Daft Punk and Kraftwerk, who I mentioned only because they are artists who claim to be robots, is much more POP than Trans Am and This Heat. This Heat sounds far funkier, punkier, weirder, more experimental, more fascinating than Trans Am to me. In summary: Trans Am suck ass and the other three bands kick ass.