Bobb Trimble - 1980 - Iron Curtain Innocence

Bobb Trimble 

1980 

Iron Curtain Innocence

This Side: Bobb Trimble With The Violent Reactions 1980

01. Glass Menagerie Fantasies 5:48

02. Night At The Asylum 4:50

03. When The Raven Calls 6:25

04. Your Little Pawn 3:50

That Side: Bobb Trimble Soliloquize 1978

05. One Mile From Heaven (Short Version) 4:07

06. Killed By The Hands Of An Unknown Rock Starr 5:29

07. Through My Eyes (Hopeless As Hell D.O.A.) 4:57

08. One Mile From Heaven (Long Version) 5:42

Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals – Don Christie

Drums – Paul Martin

Vocals, Guitar, Percussion – Bobb Trimble

“Maybe you don't know it yet, but (IF you buy these Bobb Trimble albums) you have just been handed the key to a secret realm, an alternate rock n' roll universe of dark despair, fragile hope, and gossamer beauty, a haunting personal soundworld that will always stay with you, within you...”

– Aquarius Records mailorder

“One of the most bewitching and genuinely outside broadcasts in modern private press history, the twin set of LPs cut by New England resident Bobb Trimble in the early 80s remain unclassifiable in terms of virtually anything else going on in or outside of the decade in which they were cut... Trimble was a visionary and arranger on a scale with Skip Spence, Brian Wilson and Blonde On Blonde-era Dylan... Highly recommended”

– David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue

"A delicate, unsettling dip into a boiling pool of subconscious imagery and otherworldly pixie vocalism. The best tracks cause ripples in the time/space continuum. Bobb Trimble's first album appeared like a ghost that had slipped through reality's curtain. Impossible to place inside any rational context, the music and voices seem to have been created inside your head and indeed, maybe they were."

– Byron Coley [album sticker notes]

“['Iron Curtain Innocence' and 'Harvest of Dreams' are] easily among the most intriguing rediscoveries of the decade, and necessary listening for anyone fascinated by the brink of human emotions, and subsequently accustomed to meeting music on the musician’s oftentimes peculiar terms”

– Doug Mosurock, Dusted Reviews

The dirty secret behind the vast majority of Lost! Unheard! Masterpieces! is that the back story is almost always far more interesting than the music itself. Certainly that would appear to be the case with Bobb Trimble, an almost unknown singer/songwriter from blue-collar Worcester, MA, whose two albums' worth of surreal acid folk could not have been more out of step with their new wave times. Iron Curtain Innocence was originally released in a tiny vinyl pressing of between 300 and 500 copies and featured a disquieting cover image of the moon-faced Trimble sitting in front of a Sears Portrait Studio-style class photo backdrop, blankly holding both a guitar and a submachine gun, and everything about the album has an air of "that boy ain't right." Another major part of the Trimble legend -- that his live backing group, the Kidds, had an average age somewhere south of adolescence and was broken up by suspicious parents who didn't like this weird guy hanging around their children -- gives rise to darker mutterings and unsupported conjectures that have little to do with the music, and that's what it really boils down to: obscurantist cult records almost never have anything to do with the music, which almost invariably turns out to be considerably less interesting when listened to on its own merits.

Almost, that is. Because as it turns out, Iron Curtain Innocence turns out to be a really good piece of lo-fi psychedelia. In particular, the outstanding first three tracks, "Glass Menagerie Fantasies," "Night at the Asylum," and "When the Raven Calls," are an increasingly disturbing trilogy blending the druggy atmosphere of Pink Floyd's first few post-Syd Barrett albums, the gentle acoustic side of late-era Beatles, and some lo-fi synthesizers and tape loops, culminating in the disquieting climax of the epic "When the Raven Calls." Though the rest of the brief album doesn't quite live up to its outstanding first half, "Killed at the Hands of an Unknown Rock Starr" features some fine space rock guitar noodling and one of the helium-pitched Trimble's most assertive lead vocals, and "Through My Eyes (Hopeless as Hell: D.O.A.)" makes good use of backwards tapes and hand percussion.