Trans Am: Surrender To The Night

Markedly less static than its predecessor, 1995's Trans Am, Surrender To The Night opens with a coldly malevolent mechanical hum that evolves into "Motr," a straight-ahead rocker lacking only vocals to make it worthy of Thin Lizzy or Rush. Then it immediately veers into the screeching, synthetic experimentalism of "Cologne," a song recalling Kraftwerk on an amphetamine binge. Primitive, tinker-toy electronics and the kind of obtuse, nuevo-fusion attitudinal shift that colors similar work by Tortoise, Gastr del Sol and The Sea And Cake—all playmates of the instrumental-only Trans Am—are at the heart of Surrender To The Night's back-and-forth sequencing. Bound to be most trying is the speaker-shredding partnership of "Rough Justice" and "Zero Tolerance," dilettantism at its most painful extreme. But by the time the monorail-smooth grooves of "Night Dreaming" and the title track float by, the noise is just a bump in the road, and Trans Am ends up with a largely successful experiment.