Desperate times call for heavy music.
Town Troubles is no stranger to desperate times. The local rock group been a force in the Coachella Valley since 2010, consistently providing a rock edge despite big changes in the band, in the scene, and in the world. The band returned with new music (Love Overrides Beauty) last year after a nine-year gap, and they quickly followed up with an album featuring a new lineup. Frontman/guitarist and founding member Bolin Jue is now joined by Mario Estrada on bass and Jeronimo Arellano Contreras on drums.
To Be Honest is a 10-track epic of monster riffs and major symbolism. Songs deal with topics such as toxic masculinity, the power of words, and the struggle with finding the truth, and use varied instrumental styles in a manner that is often heavy, frequently poppy and sometimes sweet. For the moment, the album will only be available at Town Troubles shows on cassette, starting with the band’s performance on Saturday, Dec. 7, at Coachella Valley Brewing Company in Thousand Palms.
During a recent phone interview with Jue, he talked about one the album’s major themes—the power of words. Track 4 on the tape is “Words,” and track 5 is “Caution: Words.”
“A lot of the themes throughout here deal with coming out of the last Trump administration, and going into the next one,” Jue said. “I find it kind of bizarre and comical, but also troubling, how there’s a disconnection between people’s words and actions. I guess a lie is one way of talking about that, but there are also other ways that it happens, like when people have a lack of awareness with identity, or manipulation. … This idea of cancel culture and finger-pointing and how the internet plays into people’s judgment of each other’s phrases and words plays into our behaviors. I think it’s all jumbled up, and that … seeps into our beliefs and, ultimately, our choices and our actions.”
The internet’s influence on people is a running thread throughout the album, with roots in the band’s previous album. Opening track “Experts” repeats the line, “Knowledge ain’t wisdom,” and the funny-but-true lyric: “The new expert has it all in its head.”
“This idea of words is like a jungle that we’re having to chop through,” Jue said. “If you’re not aware of that, if you’re not conscious of that, and you’re just kind of going through it, you can get eaten by a word tiger, and there are consequences to that. I didn’t think we would be here again, and here we are—and I think a lot of that has to do with simple things.”
“Glitchez” furthers the narrative, expressing the untrustworthiness of some news sources via lines like: “Glitch in the headlines, glitch in the truth.”
“I’ll hear people say things, and they don’t really understand what those things mean,” Jue said. “Words can sort of be empty. For example, fear-mongering: ‘They’re eating the cats and eating the dogs.’ … Having a lack of ability to think critically about these things, I am baffled. How are we letting these words hit us over the head? … The country has had a history with that, like the way that history has been rewritten, the way things have been taught, the way that language itself was kept from slaves and groups of oppressed people as a way of holding power over them.”
Jue’s observations on this changing world went straight into his lyrics.
“Al these ridiculous things that certain presidential candidates are saying … it trickles down to people,” Jue said. “I hear them in the classroom; I hear them at bars; I hear them at shows; I hear them at family gatherings, and I just can’t help but put them in my pocket and use them for later.”
While To Be Honest features former member Bryan Garcia on some songs, the album is illustrative of a new era for Town Troubles.
“These songs, more than any of the other EPs that I’ve released, are more accurately representative of what I wanted Town Troubles to be, not just sonically, but lyrically,” Jue said. “I was always sort of held back by certain outside voices and inside voices. I was urged not to be political, and it’s probably why it’s a different lineup now. These songs, I’ve had in my pocket for a while, but I ended up having to mask certain ideas. … I’m definitely more doing what I wanted to do.”
Every copy of the To Be Honest cassette comes with a lyric zine, featuring the words to every song, as well as some graphics and text effects.
“In grad school, I read a book of poetry, and the author did this really interesting thing where he was putting frames over certain words,” Jue said. “He was using them very differently than I am, but I always really liked that idea, because poetry can be kind of limited sometimes. You’re just working with texts, so what else on a keyboard can you use to add meaning to your words? … So much of what I was talking about earlier was about manipulation, and this weird relationship that we have with words today. A lot of that has to do with the idea that our perception of reality is through a frame, these tiny little windows that we carry around with us.”
Amidst the liner notes explaining writing and recording locations for the album, the lyric zine includes the sentence, “All songs written in Beaumont, CA (fighting a white supremacist later seen crying outside a courthouse).”
“I think it was 2017, 2018,” Jue said. “I didn’t have a place to live; I was couch-surfing. I was sort of in a sort of dark place, and it was hard for me to just get by. My brother lived in Beaumont at the time, so I took the bus as close to Beaumont as I could, and it dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. It was Yucaipa or somewhere, and I saw this white supremacist. I already knew what was going to happen. I saw him walking down the street from very far away, and I knew exactly what was about go down. I usually attract these crazy people. … This guy came up to me, and I’m assuming he was intoxicated, and he lifted his shirt up to reveal all of his Nazi tattoos. Swings weren’t swung; we didn’t literally brawl it out, but there was a little stir-fuffle in the middle of the night, and I got out of it unharmed.”
Seeing the same man later led Jue to another moment of reflection and lyric writing, resulting in the toxic masculinity ballad “Boys.”
“A week later, I was on that same bus, and this fellow was on the bus, and he was in front of me, but he was with his partner, and he was bawling,” Jue said. “I was eavesdropping about all this, and he was going to court for something or other, and he knew that the outcome was not going to be a good one. It was really strange, because the first time I saw this guy, he was trying to fight me—and this dude was huge. He was ripped and 6 feet tall or whatever, and the second time I saw him, he was in this very vulnerable, sort of opposite state. It definitely was a writing moment for sure, and I had conflicting feelings, because in the one moment, I wanted to laugh at him … but then in the other moment, I was like, ‘This guy’s life is so much shittier than mine.’ … I don’t want to keep talking about Trump, but I am angry at those figures, and I also kind of feel bad for them, because I don’t know what it’s like to have so much inner turmoil that the way that you carry yourself outwardly is so problematic.”
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