By: Kayleigh Drake 

If there’s one thing I love in the vast world of music, it’s shoegaze. Even more so if it’s loud. And that’s exactly why I’m a big fan of Trauma Ray. 

Trauma Ray is a five-piece shoegaze band based in Fort Worth, Texas. (Come through, fellow Southerners!) But I wouldn’t say they’re the “ethereal,” UK-in-the-early-90s brand of shoegaze. Rather, they remind me of a cross between Hum and the French shoegaze-meets-post-metal band Alcest. (Can I say “shoegaze” one more time?) They incorporate these HUGE fuzzed-out riffs (they have three guitarists, by the way) with singer Uri Avila’s velvety smooth, melodic tenor vocals and a boatload of reverb. It’s like shoegaze and metal and grunge all blended together, and it’s really fucking good. 

Their latest release, a five-song EP called Carnival, just dropped last week on Dais Records. And our very own local store Seasick Records has an exclusive pressing of it on red ripple vinyl, which you can grab right here! In fact, Seasick is one of only two record stores that even have this variant, the other being End Of An Ear in Austin. So that alone is cool as hell.

I’ll start by saying that Uri has a really beautiful voice. (And face, honestly.) And while most of Trauma Ray’s songs consist of these bigass, heavy riffs, his vocals floating atop them provides the perfect foil to the loud backdrop. This EP is equal parts loud and heavy and dark and dreamy. Think Hum if they were channeling Slowdive, or Failure if they cranked up the reverb. It also bears some similarities to the band Nothing, who are just a couple degrees of separation from Trauma Ray themselves, as Nothing’s guitarist (and Bham local) Cam Smith toured with them last year. (And speaking of, Nothing is also releasing a brand new album with a Seasick-exclusive pressing, which you can grab here!) 

Anyway, most (all??) of the songs on this EP are played in minor keys, and that lends an eerie, almost brooding quality to it. Despite being named Carnival, there’s not really anything “fun” about this record. And that’s not a bad thing. 

We start things out on an extremely dreamy note with “Carousel.” Barely over two minutes long, this percussionless, instrumental guitar track is like an extended intro to the subsequent track, “Hannibal.” But it’s one that could actually go on for twice as long and I wouldn’t mind one bit. It reminds me a lot of the beginning of the Alcest album Les Voyages De L’Âme. (And if you haven’t listened to it, do that immediately after you listen to Carnival. YWIA.) 

By the time “Hannibal” rolls around, shit gets HEAVYYYY. This song is honestly metal as fuck, especially the downtuned, riff-laden intro. But that heaviness is, once again, balanced by Uri’s vocals which keep it from going into full-on aggressive territory. The chorus of this song kind of reminds me of “Ember,” the opening track of their previous LP Chameleon, which happens to be my favorite song of theirs. So I’m already impressed. 

Next up is “Méliès,” named after the French filmmaker, and the heavy vibes keep flowing like a fountain with this one. It starts out with a dramatic, wall-of-sound intro that proceeds into a loud-soft-loud verse-to-chorus progression. We get a “false ending” around the 4:30 mark, but just when you think the song is over, it drifts back in with a slow, reverby guitar-and-vox-only coda to close it out. 

Then comes the longest track on the EP, the almost six-and-a-half-minute “Funhouse.” Contrary to its title, it’s a gloomier song that starts out with a slow, crushing riff with some tremolo picking going on underneath. It picks up the pace by the time we get to the verse/chorus part, and by that point it almost sounds like you’re listening to a completely different song than you were at the start. I kinda love when songs do that — it’s like a two-for-one song within a song. A song-ception, if you will. 

Closing us out is “Clown,” which is when we really get into Failure territory. This midtempo track would fit right in on Fantastic Planet, imho, with its thick, spacey-grungey riffs, not to mention the C-sharp-minor key. 

All in all, this is a solid offering from Trauma Ray. And with the extremely dark and eerie things going on in the world right now — as if we’re all on some crumbling carnival ride we can’t get off of — I’d say this is a very welcome soundtrack. Listen to it here, and stop by Seasick to grab yourself a copy!