Trost – Trust Me

• 18th Nov 2008

To produce an album so packed with fresh ideas and innovative ideas is surely a measure of Annika Line Trost’s (member of electro pop act Cobra Killer) hunger and ambition to make great music.

Not content to sit back and rest on the laurels of her day job and to her credit she has produced a fine array of 12 tuneful pop gems, ridden with eclectic beats, and as a tight array of jazz percussion as your likely to hear all year.

There’s definitely a ‘Nancy Sinatra’ depth to Trost’s voice, the sultry swagger, which kind of guides the song behind it ensuring everything else just seems to take second fiddle to her hypnotic vocals. She orchestrates the whole thing making it a theatrical, dark and moody sound that would be the perfect soundtrack to burlesque performance.

Album opener ‘Cowboy’, sung in German, sets the provocative mood of the album instantly; what’s so interesting about Trost is the immediacy with which she throws you right into the realms of her music, there’s rarely what you would call a conventional intro to any of the tracks, the listener is almost thrust into each song as if you’ve skipped the first two minutes. However this creates a wonderfully enchanting effect. The music is also often very repetitive, which adds to its magic. Similarities in this sense can be drawn to ‘The Fall’ when Mark E Smith was at the height of his creative prowess, preferring his post punk outfit to serve out unvaried music; not by way of being uninteresting, but in order to serve as a back drop to the vocals. This effect has clearly not been lost on Trost, and his used to great effect on album highlight, ‘This Strange Someone’, where the music is very taciturn but the perfect accompaniment to Trost’s ambition for the eerie and obscure.

‘Trust Me’ is certainly not an album to suit the conventional listener. It’s undoubtedly the work of a complex mind and at times will often baffle the listener. What is so enthralling about Trost though is her ability to put an archaic taste into a very modern sounding record whilst maintaining fresh and innovative ideas, and for this alone she deserves maximum kudos.