Truckasauras Tea Parties, Guns and Valor

• Words: Sam Mickens
• Label: Fourthcity-Journal of Popular Noise

Though Truckasauras leaves room for a great deal of humor in their work–their debut album features toasting by the decidedly un-Jamaican DJ Collage, and its booklet comes streaked in a raging Hulkamaniac font–the music they make should not be taken lightly. Sequencing an armada of old Roland electronic machinery via a circuit-bent Gameboy, Truckasauras makes abstracted instrumental hip-hop more emotional than any artists in recent memory. Alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) triumphant and melancholic, their songs throb with the cultural malaise of a 1980s childhood, recasting marathon Nintendo sessions and WWF obsession in the context of drunken, complicated adulthood.