TRAUMA RAY – chameleon – VINYL LP (cloudy green)

Since first bonding over Slowdive at a Texas karaoke bar six years ago, musicians Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez have grown trauma ray into Fort Worth’s foremost flag bearer of crushing shoegaze. A five-piece rounded out by bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt, the band’s debut album, ‘Chameleon,’ captures their evolving sound at an apex of majestic devastation. A fusion of downer hooks, gauzy melancholia, and bulldozer riffs, the album heaves and crashes across 50 minutes of stacked amplifier alchemy. Lyrically the songs trace similarly lofty and brooding terrain; Avila says « The theme is death. And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms. »
Chameleon opens with « Ember, » dreamy and distant, alternately anthemic and apocalyptic, defeated and deafening. Lead single « Bishop » perfectly encapsulates trauma ray’s depth and dimension, ripping out of the gate with “the biggest, baddest, saddest wall of sound.” Lyrics about being burnt at the stake and « tossed in the flame » float above a stop-start assault of precision distortion, eventually expanding into a lush, heavy, sorrowful end coda. « Spectre » is a mysterious, introspective dirge, envisioned as a « mellow, slowcore, Duster-thing, » all feeling and heavy fuzz chords (with no lead guitar). Avila wrote it, « to be a hymnal » from the perspective of someone who won’t let go – a ghost, an ex, a shadow self.
Although the album is rich with subtleties, graceful lulls, and « breaths of air, » the band’s three guitar attack is its defining force, a power flexed to its peak on « Bardo. » Perez’s intentions were blunt: « I wanted to write a riff that was hard as fuck. » The result is alternately mean and eerie, veering between noisy one string bends and surging headbang, mapping a middle ground between Unwound and early-Deftones. One of trauma ray’s greatest gifts is their ability to make doomy, sledgehammer heaviness sound like an earworm, without production tricks or gimmicks: « Riff, verse, chorus, three guitar parts – that’s all you need. » This quality is particularly apparent on the title track, a churning slab of amplifier worship, swirling chords, and heavenly, defeated vocals about not belonging, shape-shifting, and death (« A twisted face / Void of attention / An empty space / In your reflection »).
« U.S.D.D.O.S » closes the album, swaying across seven minutes of grey skied guitar and haunted voice, subtly thickening as it deepens. Feedback and shrapnel gradually begin raining down, like a satellite disintegrating in the atmosphere. Titled as an acronym after a poem by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño that loosely translates to « a dream within a dream, » the melody softens, smears, and then disappears, slowly swallowed by the gravity of eternal descent. ‘Chameleon’ is a masterpiece of craft, balance, melody, lyricism, and gravity, flexing a fresh vision of loud-quiet-loud architectures and the vertigo depths of blasted harmonics. From Slowdive to Nothing, to Hum and beyond, the band absorb and expand on their influences into a rare and dedicated alchemy. trauma ray’s cinematic tempest is a gathering storm only just taking flight.