Spooky, funky, crazy, twisted, capricious, eccentric, freakish and sparkling like the glitter ball in a disused and haunted disco. That’s ‘Trust Me’ by Trost – an album of such imponderable cult-chic that you could wrap it in a copy of American Psycho, throw it out of the window of a apartment block in Berlin, get a private detective to trail it, have Peter Lorre pick it up from a lake in Paris and hand it on to Marlene Dietrich as she sings the lead line from Portishead’s ‘Sour Times’ before you even have time to kill a dead man. It’s that clever, it’s that tormented and it’s that’s cryptic – in that order. But Trost have call more than most to play this card; they’re German, and it was German Expressionism, the cinematic movement of the 1910s and 1920s that went onto influence that whole film-noir shebang back in the 50s and early 40s and which Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons later used as the template for their delightfully avante-garde trip-hop project ‘Dummy’. And whilst ‘Trust Me’ stays clear of the sampled, dehumanising beats of ‘Dummy’ it shares many of its signatures; the twanging Henry Mancini/John Barry guitars and strings, the jazz percussion, the electronic beeps and bloops, the scratchy surface atmospherics and the melodramatic sweep of the vocal, realised magically by punk-loving, uber-cool sour puss, Annika Line Trost.
Not that it’s completely gloomy, by any means. In fact, on tracks like ‘Cowboy’ and ‘In Diesen Raum’ it’s rather like having the leggy, kooky members of bands like Moloko, Psapp and or Fiery Furnaces rush into your headphones in an explosion of giggles and bonkers dancing. And the squeezy, juicy beats and buzzes of ‘Sans Ta Scie’ are positively groovy, owed in part to the snappy, freeform patterns of Thomas Wydler – one time member of the ‘Bad Seeds’.
Goldfrapp, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marianne Faithfull – it’s all in there. She’s evidently as happy to spin her tales of cheap lipstick, weird conversations, and the atropine of the yard in French and English as she is in German and this is where the album’s strength lies; it’s as multilingual as it multipersonalitied. Fans of Jarvis Cocker’s recent compilation, ‘The Trip’ are likely to find few better ripostes than this.
Pure class from start to finish.