Echoes August 2003 issue

The Hub
Trucker [Innova]
There’s a wicked Dennis Gonzalez track called Free Jazz Is Thrash, Asshole. It might have been written either for or maybe about The Hub. At times the American trio comes across as thrashers among thrashers, a band given to bursts of energy so frenzied and rabid that they sound like they’ve walked straight off the set of one of the gloriously schlock Zombies Take Over The Earth films and picked up instruments for the sheer hell of it. Yet turning up their amps and kicking ass isn't the sum total of The Hub's approach to making music. They have an Ornette Coleman-like attention to detail that can be detected on several pieces on this fun and frolicking record. The ominous barrage of sound that often opens the band’s compositions invariably gives way to pert, compact funk grooves or dippy, intoxicated swing. Which in turn gives way to schlock Zombie-like thrash. Yes, The Hub’s mission in life is to pack as many faux-departs and U-turns into their clenched fist compositions as possible, ensuring that the kicks to the temple are of a rich diversity. They remind me intermittently of Pinski Zoo, Sex Mob, John Zorn, Prime Time and the rather unknown west coast rock-improv group Post-Junk trio. Drummer Sean Noonan, bassist Tim Dahl and saxophonist Dan Magay have that same smart combination of anarchic streak and cast-iron discipline that characterises any band that likes to get its hands dirty and still sound good. It seems to me that The Hub are very much about evoking the sweaty bearpit ambience of gigs where audience and performers are face to face and I can only imagine that this music is thrilling live. At times the leaps and lurches end up stuck in some harmonic dead zones but as they proved on their previous disc Vandalism, The Hub have more than enough substance to take their tunes beyond a facile funk-punk-jazz noise fest. At a time when sedate gloss is all too prevalent on CDs in a lot of genres other than jazz I hasten to add it’s refreshing to hear a band who realise that a sense of the physical exertion of the musician the beading of sweat, the flexing of bicep and the stretching of sinew can make for vital, vibrant sounds. Trucker is all muscle.
JJJ1/2

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