Rock out to a sonic cacophony

Trans Am dress to match their anti-war message.

Metallica's Enter Sandman was such a boring choice by the US military when selecting interrogation music.

Trans Am's album Redline, with its psychosis-inducing power, would be far more effective for torturing prisoners in Iraq.

Not that Trans Am would condone the use of their synth-guitar-rock for torture. Although, as a sideline to Trans Am, bass and synth player Nathan Means has been researching the interrogation method for a story he's writing.

"Blasting rock music at them for 12-or-more hours while they're chained to the ground - it's a real Clockwork Orange-type scenario," he says. They play the Kings Arms tonight with their mates and sometime collaborators the [expletive] Champs from San Francisco.

Trans Am's last album, Liberation, was their reaction to the war in Iraq. While it's not their greatest work - it's incomplete and bitsy in places - it's unique because it's mostly instrumental. Yet, says Means, it's a protest album in the vein of Public Enemy.

"We were fans of Public Enemy [and] this was a cool way to approach it, keep it fun, keep a cool dance beat behind it and make it interesting to listen to. There's a pretty pointed political message on a couple of songs, the others not so much, but they fit together because our approach was, and this is something that has plenty of precedence in our music as a whole, which is a dystopic-kind-of-nightmarish, science-fiction element. Because to me, that's kind of where we've got to.

"There was this sense of living in [Washington] DC with a non-reality, or a science fiction reality, invading everything. There's helicopters everywhere. Police cars have their flashers on all the time. That's something they copied from the Tel Aviv police department. I don't think having the police driving round with their lights on is going to make anybody feel safer, it's just going to make you more scared."

Means now lives in New Zealand while guitarist Phil Manley and drummer Sebastian Thomson both live in San Francisco. The long-distance thing is fine by the band. After all, they've been together since forming in Washington DC in 1990.

"Things were starting to get a little bit tight between us," says Means. "Within a year of 1995 [when they released their debut self-titled album] we were at a pretty good level. We'd been to Europe, we'd headlined tours in the US and we'd quit our jobs.

"All these great things that a lot of people never get to do, we were doing. We'd been at that same level for years and I think the tedium, and as much as you get to go to exciting places and play cool festivals in Europe, it just becomes a little bit tedious. And you begin to suspect, although it's not really true, that the band is holding you back and stopping you from doing the other things you want to do.

"So having the space between us has made us realise that we actually still like doing it a lot."

Means, Manley and Thomson were in the same school orchestra when they were 12, but didn't know each other. Means was a "totally crap" cellist, Thomson was a "really amazing violinist" and Manley played "pretty good" saxophone.

Throughout high school Manley and Means played in bands together. When they kicked an incompetent drummer out of one of these bands, they recruited Thomson who had just returned from his home country of Argentina.

"We met him and he was kind of sulky, nerdy and he had a handmade Bauhaus jacket. He'd taken a denim jacket and a marker and written Bauhaus on it. And we were like, 'He seems pretty cool'. And we ended up having a whole lot of connections, Led Zeppelin, pot ... those deep connections," he laughs.

There are hints of Led Zeppelin, and other more classic yet cheesy rock bands such as Boston and Yes, in Trans Am's music. But the intense, hypnotic onslaught of Trans Am is what leaves the biggest impression on you. Means says, "I guess we try to make imaginative music. A lot of it's quite sound-tracky, and lends itself to wandering around in your mind."

The on-going collaboration - or should that be collision? - between Trans Am and the [expletive] Champs is also a sonic cacophony. The alliance takes the form of two separate bands, the Trans Champs (see 2001's Double Exposure) and the [expletive] Am. The latter's latest album, Gold, is the reason they're touring.

Manly also plays guitar in the Champs after replacing Justin Smith who left the band in 2002.

Means says the live show will be a mix of all the musicians on stage as well as separate sets by Trans Am and the Champs.

"We like playing down here. It's sort of like having an American crowd. In Europe there's a tendency for our music to be introduced as Tortoise underlings, and you get real serious types turning up to your shows. You play for an hour and a half and the crowd is relatively quiet for the entire show and then they give you rapturous applause for 10 minutes afterwards. It's really unsettling because [we're] used to redneck, drunk-assed Americans yelling in the middle of songs and being boisterous." What more of an invitation do you need?

Performance

*Who: Trans Am and the [expletive] Champs

*Where: Kings Arms

*When: Tonight

*Releases: The [expletive] Am - Gold (2004), Trans Am - The Redline (2000)