The aura of the lost classic pop masterpiece is a hard one to describe. It gleams out at you from behind the counter of the CD store, jumps out at you from the stack on the floor of an ex-girlfriend’s bedroom, calls to you from a late night video binge of forgotten 120 Minutes recordings. Somewhere out there, is a lone voice calling from the past, and it informs your present in an eerily preciecent way. Jen Trynin was signed to Warner Bros in the fall of 94, in the wave of rock’s “Girls with Balls” off the strength of her self distributed debut Cockamamie. When Cockamamie failed to hit, and Jen was out on the road having an ill-advised affair with her bassist, Alanis did hit, and Jen and Cockamamie were thrown under a bus.
With a little more experience, a ton of anger, and the ability to be scathingly honest in her couplets, Jen went into the studio and recorded Gun Shy Trigger Happy. With this, she staked her claim to great lost pop rock masterpiece.
Jen doesn’t mess with all the little fidgety guitar parts, playing her power chords with authority while singing soaring harmonies on top of a wall of sound. The opening cut, Go Ahead, explodes out of the speakers, the band at full volume with a chorus of Jens singing. “Go Ahead/I won’t be too far behind/kill the lights and I’ll try and keep my mind on you and my body in this bed”. The band doesn’t let her down, delivering with a ferocity that leaves you totally unprepared for the pop smarts and delicious harmonies of Februrary, which would hardly have sounded out of place coming from a small transistor radio on the beach back in 1969.
Writing Notes, is sparse and quiet, and we sink into the melancholy of the lyrics, “writing notes about being sorry driving out of town too drunk to see I miss who I used to be” over a sparse backbeat. There is Motown in the background vocals and a plaintive yearning in the lines “do you have anything to hide/don’t you have anything to hide?”
Working outside of the power trio format that she confined herself to on her first record, Jen expanded her sound, and she and Deneen worked to let each song find its own voice. Bore Me, leans on a heavy backbeat, with squirmy guitar flitting in and out of the production. Washington Hotel, lyrically plants her wants and needs front and center “I don’t know why I think that you could do anything for me/but I’d rather die thinking you can’t live without me/you can’t live without me” while sonically she’s channeling Led Zeppelin (Carouselambra-style Led Zeppelin). “I’d like to say it was great while it lasted/but I won’t lie/I’d like to think that it was you I was after/and not ask why” she opines on I Resign. The music swirls around the lyrics and creates a trance of sadness and regret.
Small wonder that she finally pens one in the third person on Around It. As Jen has written extensively about this time period, and the affair that prompted much of the lyrics on this record, it is clear that this is a brutal period of self assessment and critique. Putting a song finally on someone else must have been a relief.
Not surprisingly, Jen closes the 13 song cycle with a small quiet song, Rang You and Ran, that is simply a small, quiet story of one woman’s relationship admission: I’m not good at this and I don’t know why.
Jen Trynin’s story is that she is the least equipped person on the planet to deal with pop stardom. Her one other bit of sonic legacy is playing a mean, kick ass guitar on the one and only Loveless album, available on Q Division records from 2005. Gun Shy Trigger Happy is her one, shining bit of pop rock
--the fearless rock iguana
Buy here: Gun Shy Trigger Happy
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