Get used to these guys.
I started with A3's third album, and worked my way backwards. The original Trio trio, as it were. I picked up their debut album from a cramped record shop off of Waverley Steps, on what I think was my first visit to Edinburgh.
Edinburgh is my favourite city, but still: this proved the best part of the trip.
We've got plenty of time to talk about what makes the Trio special, but we might as well start with a summary: they're where the self-aware morbidity of the Cure crashes against the gleeful refusal to be serious that characterises the SoCal punk scene. The result is a mission statement that's staggering in its simple accuracy: depression, addiction and mortality are, above everything else, just astonishingly fucking ridiculous.
Like every hedgehog band, Trio would later struggle to figure out how to write the second line of their manifesto. That's some way ahead of us, though. "Trouble Breathing" isn't just the best song from their debut, it's the best signpost. A miserable guy meets someone much more miserable than he is, and is equal parts fascinated, concerned, and just plain amused at what weapon's-grade Goth bleakness can look like. I wrote out my version of their guiding principle above, but they give it to us themselves here, perfect right out of the gate. "It's one or another/between the rope and the bottle". Self-medication is still medication, given the definition includes the things that stop you from being dead. They then immediately follow that up with a jet-black pun, though: "I can tell you're having trouble breathing". You have to laugh, or else you'll cry, and the alcohol abuse hasn't left you all that much moisture to work with.
(There's also the amazing couplet "Look at all those stars/look at how goddamn ugly the stars are", a lyric I adored so much I stole it for a story I was writing, only for that to be the pull quote our uni fanzine used when they published it. AWKWARD.)
The fact all this talk of strangulation and breathlessness is accompanied by Matt Skiba pulling at his guitar strings like he's fixing to employ one as a garrote is just the poisoned icing on the incinerated cake. A lot of Trio songs are quite simple in structure, but when the mood takes him Skiba can put together some pretty sweet guitar parts for his sour stories. This is one of those times; a sweeping array of shifting ideas your average just-starting-out punk band might struggle to match over half an album.
It's miserable punk-pop perfection, in other words; a triumphant take on the ways it all can fail.
Good mourning, lads. We'll see you again real soon.
B side
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