
Tronics - Say! What Is This?
A deeply obscure gem of the post-punk era, Tronics were a London band that served mostly as a vehicle for outsider Ziro Baby's strange, raw vision of rock & roll between 1979 and 1984. As enamoured with Bo Diddley as they were wtih the burgeoning, noisy experiments of the post-punk scene, Tronics released several singles and cassettes in their time, bounding between zany collages, dark acoustic punk love songs, and post-punk anthems like the long-coveted "Shark Fucks" single, a classic among the Messthetics scene.
Say! What's This? comes as a companion piece to the What's the Hubub, Bub? album, presenting material not from an unearthed cassette of the past, but a selection of mostly unreleased tracks recorded between 1979 and 1983, including live tracks, demos, and other rarities.
Ziro was an unabashedly art-damaged teenager for much of the time Tronics was a band, and the tone of the proper albums reflects a lot of the openness to mistakes and ugly feelings the disaffected youth was probably going through. Say! What's This? comes on a little differently, with more easily defined power pop and punk tunes like "Do You Hear Me" and "Spontaneous Combustion," which, while recorded with the same grainy lo-fi means, drop the insular bedroom sound of Ziro's solo recordings for a full-band feel. Some of the few demos from the sessions that resulted in Love Backed by Force retain their incredibly strange one-man-band feel, such as the truly bizarre blues-roots-punk of "Squiddley Diddley," and the budget Ramones sweetness of "Spending Time." A live recording of the tender, organ-led ballad "They're Talking About Us" finds some of the same warped romanticism of Suicide at their most tender. There's still a bit of the mysterious movie dialogue tape collages and experimentalism of other releases, but by and large, Say! What's This? is a pleasant grab bag of Tronics' more band-centric material. Fred Thomas, AllMusic
TRACKLIST:
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Punky People
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Do You Hear Me
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Squiddly Diddly (LBBF Demo)
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Wild Cat Rock (Live 1983)
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Find Somewhere To Live
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Tonight
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They're Talking About Us (Live 1982)
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Spending Time (LBBF Demo)
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Time Off
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Punk Noise
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Luna Love
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Spontaneous Combustion
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Gotta Make It OK
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Goodbye