Trans Am-- Surrender to the Night (Thrill Jockey 38)

What set Trans Am's self-titled 1995 debut apart from the ever-growing heap of contemporary ambient albums was (a) its spunk-- the sting they kicked into the atmospheric sounds, and (b) its lack of a definite personality-- the trio didn't seem to know whether they were supposed to be dick-rockers, synth geeks or space captains, and there was something refreshing in this innocence.

Sadly, neither of these attributes can be credited to Surrender to the Night (stupid title, even if it meant to be tongue-in-cheek). It's a bad sign that the first note on the album sounds too much like Tortoise. After all, John McEntire, everybody's favorite ambient engineering guru, produced parts of this at his space-rock villa, Idful Studio. And its a worse sign that that same first song doesn't ever go anywhere. The next track is a new version of "Cologne," a tune which Trans Am under the title "Koln" on the nice 12" they put out on Happy Go Lucky Records a while back; this rendition pales in comparison to the original, and doesn't promise much for the rest of the album.

And there's not much going over the rest of the songs either. "Rough Justice" starts off with a nice kick, then gets ruined by an inane sound-effects explosion that erupts two minutes into it and drags on, killing the spirit of the tune, through to its end. And you can almost get into the feeling of "Carboforce," the second-to-last track, until you realize that the groove that sounds so cool on it sounds too much like a riff on Can's "Yoo Doo Right." Trans Am sounds unsure on this sophomore effort. Maybe they've been reading about themselves too much (their press kit currently consists of about 50 fifty pages worth of a variety of critics' praisings of their debut)-- being told what they're supposed to be like, instead of coming to their own sound through an open-minded exploration.

--- Brian Greene

(Trans Am will appear with The Sea and Cake at the Black Cat in Washington D.C. on May 3rd)