Are there casualties in the thinkpiece economy? For every forgotten microgenre in the ceaseless proliferation of accelerated cultural capital, there’ve certainly been a lot of content creators. Bands associated with each movement, blogs pinned with a genre — the critical world is built on the backbone of spinning trends, fickle tastes, and changing consumer climates that at times used to feel endless. Whether we like it or not, the rise of internet democracy has naturally brought an unprecedented cultural saturation that, when paired with the increasing speed of critical opinion on the web, feels like it collapses in on itself every few years. Sites break trends, trends — especially amateur trends soon burdened by the weight of a sometimes-unwarranted professionalism — limit the conversation surrounding those pigeonholed in a genre, and then it all fades, known only in hazy associations by proxy, borne back ceaselessly into the flattened arc of history.
Com Truise is the stage name of Seth Haley. He’s an art director from New Jersey who now lives in L.A., and his moniker is a spoonerism of “Tom” “Cruise.” I like to imagine this came out of the popularity of Top Gun in the late 1980s, when the movie surged to its unprecedented peak and the US Navy allegedly set up recruitment booths in major cinemas to attract fans. There’s an interesting theory that the entire film is actually a front for some homoerotic subliminal messaging, as dramatized by Quentin Tarantino in the 1994 film Sleep With Me. Like Com Truise, this is something we should care about.
In 2010, Com Truise released his debut EP, Cyanide Sisters. It was a vibrant, funky aesthetic exercise in 1980s synthpop that, with concurrent acts like Neon Indian and Blackbird Blackbird, became a subgenre that defined the late-2000s/early-2010s. The style has since soundtracked Adult Swim bumps and Portlandia intros, saturating the internet with an infinity of bad thinkpieces and terrible imitators. But you know this.
Like most things, trends must die or change to survive, and most artists associated with the era have jumped ship, opting for fresher takes to keep things interesting. Com Truise, surprisingly, has not. Silicon Tare sounds like 2010, which could be a good thing, depending on how you look at it. 2010 was a good year for me — I was a sophomore in high school, joined the track team, smoked pot to blog bands, and ate shitty fast food with my boys in the cul-de-sac behind school. Com Truise sounds like the inside of my boy’s Dodge Neon, rattling the gross interior with each stupid speed bump in the food court parking lot. It was a good time, and Com Truise is a good band. Nothing new — certainly not at all at pace with a lot of the more forward-thinking electronic music coming out these days — but I’m having a good time. He’s sticking to his guns and I gotta respect that. You want another hit?