Trauma Club shines on their new album, Seeing In The Dark
Trauma Club is not an exclusive club. In fact, they hope you’ll join them. To that end, their debut album, Seeing In The Dark, out now, is an honest appeal, a kind of open invitation to openness, both with one another, and perhaps more importantly, with ourselves. The Portland band, fronted by Caleb Bauscher, released their first self-titled EP last April, and have continued with a steady stream of singles since, but Seeing In The Dark lands as the first full project with Trauma Club’s current lineup, interpolating the band’s new wave roots with newfound elements of midwest emo and pop punk.
It’s in this interpolation that Trauma Club hits their stride. The heart of the group has always been Bauscher’s songwriting, undergirded by the pulsing, 80’s-inspired synths of founding member and long-time collaborator Tom Wolf, but Seeing In The Dark shines with the additional influence of Quinton Donohue (bass), Keegan Leonburg (drums), and Alie Krohn (vocals), all joined since the release of the previous EP.
Of these additions, perhaps the most immediately noticeable is Krohn’s voice, singing counterpoint to Bauscher, and in doing so, blowing the typical emo solipsism up into a duet, a conversation, an appeal to the human connection which has always been the only answer to the pains of being alive.
“Alie started singing on “Making It Up” as just a featured vocalist, and we all hit it off so well that I was just like, we should just have two lead singers. We wrote this whole album, and it was so cohesive, and everyone worked together really well, and yeah, that’s how we got this sound,” says Bauscher of the group’s new direction.
The instrumentation is not to be slept on either–Donohue and Leonburg form a newly energized and dynamic rhythm section, able to drive ahead on “Poor Thing,” then lean into the heavy backbeat of “Stuck.” Wolf’s synth continues to cut through the mix, alternately giving the swells that characteristic 80’s weight, and serving as the catchy melodic core on tracks like “Getoutofmyhead.”
In true emo fashion, there’s a flair for the melodramatic, but Bauscher remains grounded as a songwriter, couching meditations on mortality in the quotidian. In many ways the album is about seeing past the surfaces of daily life, past the masks we put on, peering into the depths of one another’s interiority. On “Making It Up,” Bauscher peels back the curtain:
And if I tell you I’m fine;
I’m making it up
When I’m wearing your smile;
I’m making it up
When I put on your clothes;
I’m making it up
This life I was sold;
I’m making it up
“Kater (Hungover),” features vocals from Portland’s Ray Ramano, who sings:
You’re dying to watch you
Swim at the bottom
And when you resurface
The surface is frozen
The second person “you” here seems collapsed into itself, disembodied, a “you” stuck watching yourself through the haze of a liquid surface. Later, Krohns voice comes in, echoing a counterpart: “I want to; but I can’t be you,” she repeats, adding another layer to the fractal pattern of watchers watching, wanting.
The album’s closer, “Empty,” begins with a recording of Bauscher, captured outside the studio, giving voice to the kind of malaise that Seeing In The Dark both embodies, but also pushes back on.
“Yeah, it’s definitely a type of therapy, you know. A way to get out these emotions. And like, maybe I feel them at the time, but I don’t feel them all the time,” says Bauscher of the songwriting process. “It’s a sad fucking song. It was probably more that [Alie] was concerned about my wellbeing than anything, but yeah while I was waiting for Quinton to pick me up on the way to the studio, I just sat outside and kinda talked about how I was feeling when I wrote that song.”
If Trauma is the constant, then Trauma Club offers something like trauma bonding–a coming together around the shared experiences of our modern lives, admitting the things we feel but are taught to hide, and acknowledging that sometimes the only way out is through. The band’s all here. Join the club.
Trauma Club plays McMenamins Mission Theater this Saturday, November 22nd. After that they’re planning a West Coast tour! Get tickets for the Portland show and stay tuned for future tour dates.
