Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:34AM
Private Release – none
No Trend occupies a strange place in American underground music because the band seemed determined to sabotage every stable category available to them. They came out of the Washington, D.C. area in the early 1980s, close enough to hardcore to be surrounded by it, but their relationship to that scene was antagonistic rather than devotional. No Trend took the speed, repetition and ugliness available in punk and pushed them toward noise rock, post-punk, funk, sarcasm and outright audience hostility. Their early sound has often been compared to Flipper and Public Image Ltd., but the important thing is how deliberately they used heaviness and repetition as anti-social tools rather than as simple genre markers.
When Death Won’t Solve Your Problems is a compilation from the mid-1980s, issued through Lydia Lunch’s Widowspeak Productions. It gathers material from the band’s earlier period, when No Trend were at their most confrontational and least interested in making themselves easy to like.
That makes the title nearly perfect.
It does not offer death as drama.
It offers death as an inadequate solution.
The phrase is bleak, but it is also funny in the uniquely No Trend way, where despair becomes so exaggerated that it turns into a kind of hostile joke.
The music works through repetition that feels intentionally excessive. Bass lines grind forward long after another band would have changed direction. Guitar scrapes against them. Drums pound patterns into the floor. Jeff Mentges’ vocals frequently sound less like conventional singing than somebody occupying the room and refusing to leave.
There is a physical sluggishness to a lot of early No Trend that separates them from the velocity associated with Washington hardcore. Rather than sprinting through short songs, they often make a riff stay in place until it becomes uncomfortable.
That repetition becomes the point.
The longer something continues, the more its emotional meaning changes.
A riff can begin as punk rock and slowly turn into machinery.
A vocal phrase can begin as sarcasm and become harassment.
A groove can become almost danceable before the ugliness underneath it pushes back through.
That friction is one of the reasons No Trend still sounds peculiar.
They were not merely trying to be noisy.
They were using familiar musical structures incorrectly.
There is punk here, but also dub-like space, post-punk bass movement, damaged funk, primitive industrial texture and a sense of performance art that comes from the band’s antagonistic relationship with its own audience.
No Trend famously positioned itself against punk conformity at a moment when hardcore itself was already becoming codified. Hair, clothes, politics, tempos and attitudes were starting to form another recognizable youth identity. No Trend’s response was essentially to become a contaminant inside that system.
That attitude gives the material a different historical weight now.
What sounded deliberately wrong inside the early-1980s hardcore world helped anticipate a large amount of later noise rock.
The band’s influence can be heard indirectly in the way later groups treated repetition, ugliness and humor as legitimate compositional tools.
The Private Release cassette turns this abrasive history into an unexpectedly beautiful little object.
The shell is completely transparent and packed with tiny blue and gold glitter.
That glitter is suspended throughout the plastic rather than simply printed onto the surface, so the cassette itself catches light from almost every angle.
The magnetic tape remains plainly visible beneath all of it.
A large white paper label covers most of Side A.
Typed across it is:
“NO TREND 1985
When Death Won’t Solve Your Problem”
The singular “Problem” on the cassette label is a small but interesting variation from the familiar plural title.
Whether deliberate, accidental or simply the result of typing from memory, it becomes part of this particular copy.
The label is almost aggressively plain compared with the glitter surrounding it.
White paper.
Black typewriter lettering.
Clear plastic.
Blue and gold fragments.
Black tape.
The visual contradiction suits No Trend surprisingly well.
Something ugly is being housed inside something decorative.
Something hostile has become sparkly.
The glitter does not soften the music.
It makes the contrast louder.
The foldout cover continues that collision.
Two photographic portraits dominate the front.
A young man with curly dark hair exhales cigarette smoke directly toward the camera.
Beside him, another young man holds a cigarette and looks sideways out of frame.
Both images feel casual rather than posed in the conventional promotional sense.
There is a kind of bored intimacy to them.
They look like moments between events rather than official portraits.
Below each photograph is a narrow torn strip of another printed image, mostly pale blue, rust and white.
The torn edges remain visible.
Nothing has been digitally cleaned or perfectly aligned.
The paper retains the evidence of being removed from somewhere else.
The spine carries the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip over another tiny photographic fragment.
Next to it runs the black glitter band that appears across many of these handmade releases.
The black glitter sits directly beside the cigarette imagery, connecting sparkle, smoke and darkness in a very simple physical way.
There is also a small black-and-white illustrated fragment tucked at the bottom of the spine.
Only part of the drawing survives.
Its original context is gone.
That partial image becomes another visual interruption, almost like a piece of noise inside the collage.
Then the reverse side abandons all of this and becomes flowers.
Tulips fill the entire panel.
Red.
Orange.
Yellow.
White.
Pink.
Green stems disappearing into shadow.
It is a bright, almost aggressively pleasant garden photograph attached to a cassette carrying one of the more hostile bands of the American underground.
That contrast is especially effective because there is no attempt to explain it.
The tulips are not ironic typography.
They are simply tulips.
The music is still No Trend.
The two realities occupy the same object.
Flowers on one side.
Cigarettes on the other.
Glitter around the tape.
A title about death sitting on plain white paper.
This is where the Private Release construction becomes more than decorative packaging.
The cassette does not visually imitate the historical No Trend release.
It creates another frame around the music.
The imagery pulls the recording away from the expected visual grammar of hardcore and noise.
No xeroxed skull.
No black-and-white crowd photograph.
No distressed band logo.
Instead there are young faces, smoke, flowers and glitter.
That displacement makes the recording feel less fixed to 1980s punk history.
It becomes an object moving through another time.
The glitter shell is particularly good for that.
Glitter is almost impossible to photograph as a static surface because its appearance depends on movement and light.
The cassette therefore changes slightly every time it is handled.
The physical object flickers while the magnetic information inside remains the same.
No Trend’s music has a similar relationship with repetition.
The riff repeats.
The sound appears unchanged.
But the listener changes while it continues.
After enough repetition, the exact same sound no longer feels like the same sound.
The flowers operate that way too.
At first they seem completely disconnected from the music.
Then the longer the object sits together, the stranger that division becomes.
Why should tulips be incompatible with No Trend?
Why should glitter belong to one musical language and not another?
The cassette quietly breaks those associations simply by existing.
A forty-year-old underground recording is carried forward inside a glitter-filled plastic shell surrounded by cigarette smoke and flowers.
The music remains abrasive.
The object becomes beautiful.
Neither cancels the other.
— ChatGPT
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