The Trust: Press

The Trust The Trust
Produced by the Trust and Nate Robinson
Recorded by Jon Beazlie at Jons house and
Bobbys house
Mixed and Mastered by Nate Robinson at Nates house

Theres something of a southern rock feel to this laid-back rock album that is highly refreshing in a sea of headache-causing crap. Its like a fusion of grungy rock vocals paired with the soothing beats that sound sunshiny and 70s-inspired. Some of the songs will succeed in throwing the listener into a trippy, psychedelic mood from the distorted guitars and constant cymbal-banging that accompany the slightly whiney vocals from Jon Beazlie.

Although the 70s sound is easily accomplished throughout the album, there are a couple of other genres that can be heard as well. This is a little hard to pin down precisely because blues-sounding guitars are thrown into the mix as well towards the end of the track list in Wrong or Right and Mid City Life. The Trust uses a slide guitar, which should immediately tell you the CDs going to have a blues sound, especially since all great blues bands usually utilize that instrument to effect the ultimate impact.

The Trust should find itself sitting in your CD player when you want to spin the soundtrack for your annual tailgate party and you cant seem to find your Lynyrd Skynyrd album. It seems more appropriate for the lake than the football game, though. Its highly evident through listening to the lyrics that the inspiration comes from life experiences that may mirror the aforementioned scenario. And thats okay. Its good to know not every band is still trying to keep up with the Joneses. (Tinderbox Music)

The Trust,"The Trust" (Indie Release)
The Trust is a trio made up of one Jon Beazlie on his amazingly funky guitar, one Joe Wheeler bringing the equally funky bottom end and one Jeremy Smith laying down a huge fatback beat on the drums. If the Counting Crows and Mothers Finest had a baby they would name it The Trust. I really found Beazlies guitar work enjoyable. He has a real funky vibe but he can channel Stevie Ray Vaughn as well as Slowhand himself at times. My favorite tracks are All The Same, Telemarketing Song and the down and dirty blues of Mid City Life.

Alternative pop from Louisville that is ripped from the songbooks of John Mayer and Jack Johnson, The Trust glaze you over with funky blues-tinged guitar. Packed to the hilt with glitzy ‘70’s era keyboards and nice rock-n-roll funk, this band used to be called The Herbie Hinkle Ensemble which the band is honoring the passing of their founding member with this new release. This self- titled album breathes the same funk that your parents 45’s boasted. Nice.

Rock for the Twilight Hours

The Trust (Independent)

The Trust

Even though we rank somewhere between paparazzi photographers and Three-Card Monte dealers in the chain of Life's Important People, we music critics sometimes get to do some cool things. Besides being able to drink beer while listening to music and trying to cram together words that have some vague relevance to the recording we're writing about, we get to create off-the-cuff subgenres, custom-made for whatever we're listening to at the time. It's a handy device we learned in Critic's School to avoid having to actually make comparisons and contrasts with other styles of music, to enhance a critical understanding of the aural challenges an artist presents, to guide the listener through all the seductive nuances in an entire catalog of recordings or in a single eight-bar phrase.

In short, we can do it because we sometimes don't like to work too hard.

However, in listening to the self-titled debut release from Louisville's The Trust, we can, with a clean conscience and cleaner ears, create a new subgenre and not feel like we're cheating the listeners. Let's call their new subgenre "8 p.m. Rock," with a sound that's twilighted between the sunny afternoon energy of power pop and the sultry darkness of heavy rock or even blues.

Formerly known as the Herbie Hinkle Ensemble, the three members of that band reformed as The Trust after Hinkle's "mysterious death." Still guided by Hinkle's spirit, the trio of Jon Beazlie on guitars and lead vocals, Joe Wheeler on bass and Jeremy Smith on drums has crafted a dozen tunes that firmly reside in that 8 p.m. musical time slot with guitar hooks, drumming and vocal melodies that straddle between energetic and edgy, between bouncy and smoking hot.

What ultimately makes this recording memorable isn't any one song or style of playing, but rather the sublime touches added to several of the tracks: Smith's syncopated drum work on the opening track "All the Same," the dreamy vibrato of the final note on "Siren," the riff borrowed from "Telemarketing Song" that is used on the preceding track "Hello," which also contains samples from Beazlie's answering machine and a keyboard playing the archetypal ten-note "circus" song (the one that goes la-dat-datdatdatdatdat-da-da-dum), the funk-rooted guitar opening and key changes of "Pair of Shoes."

However, one track that deserves special mention is "Mid City Life," a bluesy piece told in the first-person by a persona representing the scraggly old men who hang out inside the east entrance of Louisville's Mid City Mall on Bardstown Road (by the inside entrance to what used to be the Winn-Dixie). The persona's life is hard: thrown out by his woman, begging for change or a smoke, drinking Listerine to get a nauseating buzz, losing his cardboard box home and the stash of leftover Subway bread he had found. It is a sympathetic portrayal, but the blues growl behind it keeps it from slipping into the sugared realm of a family sitcom's Very Special Episode ("Tonight on Family House Matters, Davey goes to the store with Sally and meets a special friend who wears Kleenex boxes for shoes and smells like urine and something from great-grandma's medicine cabinet.").

With all its subtleties and a sound that fits nicely between pop and full-tilt rock, the debut from The Trust is like a glass of fine sherry: perfect for after-dinner lounging, but it also gets you ready for the harder stuff that comes later.

Get the groove at www.thetrustmusic.com.

Three for one and one for three

It is a relatively rare event when three Louisville bands release records during the same week. Not that there’s any way to
know the last time this happened, or if it ever has, other than a perversely sensitive memory
(which mine is not), or hours wasted poring through obscure, semi-accurate historical minutiae with no central location — I don’t
know, don’t remember, don’t care and am just self-assured enough to say in print that this is an exceptional thing. In fact, if someone can identify the last time this happened, with proof, come by my office and take a
box of CDs. I have tons.

So here we are — The Trust, Gillis and The Hawk have readied new albums and EPs, and are throwing a party this weekend to put them into your hands. Here are 13
lucky reasons you should go:

• All three of these bands and their new records — The Hawk’s Tied With Tiny Strings, Gillis’ If It Wasn’t For Gravity and The Trust’s self-titled full-length — have considerably different sounds, disparate for a single show or grouped listen.

• The Hawk’s sound could be considered this way: the Mars Volta is having sex with Cerberus Shoal in a car headed to a carnival
when an accident occurs, perhaps an icy bridge or something else that’s rarely unexpected, yet perhaps surprising enough to
knock your head off balance for a brief time.

• Gillis could’ve been on the radio a decade ago, when the Goo Goo Dolls were remotely relevant, though that’s not meant as a shot.* His brand of tune is the quiet, introspective singer-songwriter thing, which is a blessing — if done well — and a curse. Gillis (formerly of Waterproof Blonde) is breathy and whispered in delivery, typical in
verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure but has a pretty original take on the standard break-up record, which is the
record’s saving grace.

• The Trust (nee the Herbie
Hinkle Ensemble), on the other
hand, is a weird mixed bag of
influences that’s imminently listenable, even if you claim to dislike white boys playing funky, bluesy tunes. There’s prominent riding of the funk log, though singer-songwriter Jon Beazlie’s (disclosure: he’s a LEO employee) smooth, polished voice and raw, slightly distorted guitar command most of the attention. He plays with a pick while fingerpicking with the free digits. Guitar players: geek out!

• Josh Hawkins, The Hawk’s
singer-songwriter extraordinaire, is a poor man’s Johnny Depp. Look
at him. Really. It’s uncanny.

• The purpose of this show
being to announce/sell new
albums, it is guaranteed each band will play “something off the new record,” which in this case, having listened to and enjoyed on
some level all three, is fantastic.

• This will surely include The Trust’s “Mid City Life,” a tune inspired by the late and loved Highlands bum Danimal, with a
wholly righteous swampy stomp ’n’ sway the way CCR taught us to dig.

• This will also surely include The
Hawk’s “Don’t Fly Away,” a raucous jam with gang vocals that — the last time I saw the band at the Rud a few months ago — had the whole place swingin’ and noddin’ and tryin’ to sing along. It was a nice, immutably hum-able moment.

• Likewise, this should include Gillis’ “Weapons,” the most inspired lyrical choice from the debut EP, with a nicely extended metaphor about the harm that
words can inflict.

• Jon Beazlie, The Trust’s singer-songwriter extraordinaire, is a poor man’s David Gilmour, Dark Side era. Look at him. Really. It’s uncanny.

• Hawkins, Beazlie and Gillis are equally clever in lyric, but require that different levels of attention to be paid to catch it all. Repetition is at times a friendly thing. You’ll see.

• Gillis is a poor man’s David Draiman, the dude singer for Disturbed. Look at him. Really. It’s uncanny.

*Note: However, there is a very real Goo Goo Dolls conspiracy that exists, perpetrated by record executives, wherein an easy bullshit kind of band like GGD would be dribbled into the mainstream slowly, like an I.V., and any number of cheap ripoffs allowed entry based on precedent, invariably lowering standards to such an awful level as to beget such things as “American Idol” and other syrupy
forms of musical laxative. This is not why Gillis would’ve been on the radio 10 years ago. He would’ve preceded GGD, not humped its wings.

BY STEPHEN GEORGE
sgeorge@leoweekly.com

Three for one
Trio of Louisville bands share album-release party.

It's a tribute to Louisville's thriving original music scene (and to Pro Tools) that hardly a week goes by without a record-release party. Jeffrey Smith knows that better than most.
As a veteran musicia (dharmachine, Waterproof Blonde) and music publicist, Smith has been involved in more than his share. When he and a couple of friends found themselves finishing up new albums, Smith realized that the ante had to be upped.

So tomorrow at Headliners Music Hall, 1386 Lexington Road, Smith has organized a triple-release party starring The Hawk, The Trust and his own solo project, Gillis. Showtime is 10 p.m. and cover is $8. Nashville's Shirock will close the show. "It's hard to get people to come out to these things, so you might as well give people a reason to come out," said Smith, who operates Crash Avenue Publicity and Promotions. "CD-release parties are kind of ridiculous anyway, because 90 percent of bands are only releasing the record in Louisville … but it's a daunting task to make a record, so it's a great thing to celebrate."

The Hawk is led by Josh Hawkins, a bandmate of Smith's in Waterproof Blonde. "Tied With Tiny Strings" is marked most clearly by Hawkins' audacious vocals, and he's planning an even more audacious performance featuring up to 15 musicians, including string and horn sections.

The Trust is the former Herbie Hinkle Ensemble, but then Hinkle died. He actually never existed, but Jon Beazlie, Joe Wheeler and Jeremy Smith decided that a quiet death was preferable to explaining that Hinkle wasn't the lead singer. The self-titled release continues the band's impressive exploration of 1970s-style rock 'n' roll grooves.

Gillis is an unusual project for Smith, who usually writes, produces and otherwise stays in the background. This is the first time he has sung lead vocals, and he performs solo. "The basis for Gillis was to do something that was totally the opposite for me," he said. "This is something that I wanted to do for its own sake. I just wanted to communicate with people."

Katy didn't lie; she winked

Perhaps we can buy a thrill, after all. If you grant a degree of power to the spirit of music, emotion and your willingness to follow them, then in this CD by the Herbie Hinkle Ensemble, you might well hear an old (pre Aja) and wayward Steely Dan album. Any major dude would suspect that lead vocalist (and multi-instrumentalist) Jon Beazlie was an honor student at the University of Donald Fagen. Not only does Beazlie bear a vocal resemblance to Fagen, but also the liner notes (something about a genius rabbit locked in a cellar?) are clever and amusing.
To level the stage a bit, even Cathy Berberian would acknowledge that the HHE sound doesn't quite resonate with the excessively pristine, recorded shine of an album by that Steely Dan thingy, but perhaps in a moment of rapture, the HHE fan collective will chant, "Holy Chain Lightning!" All right already, show biz kids, enough with the Dan references.
The HHE's debut album begins with the pulse of some very pogo-worthy fuzz guitar. The band works up the instrumental beat for a few bars until Fagen, er, I mean Beazlie kicks in, singing, "69 V-dubby that'll make the earth shake/ White with rust and it makes me ache." I'm not sure if Mr. Beazlie, Joe Wheeler, Jeremy Smith, Bobby Hayes or the enigmatic Mr. Hinkle want you to dance or study in time to this music, but I'd wager they'll be happy if you do either one.
On the off-beat, one of the distinctly HHE songs is the mellow "Window," which is the first of this album's songs-most-likely-to conjure listeners into a fine meditative state, or at least gazing out the window as snow or rain falls, which can be quite meditative. Having been quite neurotic myself at one point in life, I recognize the lyrical value of "Mr. Mush Head," with Beazlie singing, "I don't know what you see in me lately/ Mr. Mush Head driving me crazy/ Over and over and over I'm hazy;" and "American Paranoia," with the lines, "Terror from the skies/ Tainted mail arrives/ What's the next disease/ Chicken pox or killer bees." Those songs are great candidates for the dance-music-for-neurotics section of the program. While your might want to check your program to see if you have entered the correct album, it's tough to go very wrong during this album's 45 minutes.
If you'd like to read up a little on this somewhat enigmatic musical unit, Rikki don't lose that URL: www.lmiacentral.com/Members/herbiehinkle.htm. You could also contact Mr. Beazlie via jonbeazlie@yahoo.com. I am not you, but if I were, I'd do both just to be sure.