The Wylde Tryfles: Fuzzed And Confused – album review
THE WYLDE TRYFLES Fuzzed And Confused Soundflat LP | DL Out 12th March 2021 France’s Wylde Tryfles return with another slab of fuzzed to the max garage revival. Close your eyes and it’s 1964 once again. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it continues to spin so wildly, 45 glorious revolutions per minute […]
France’s Wylde Tryfles return with another slab of fuzzed to the max garage revival. Close your eyes and it’s 1964 once again.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it continues to spin so wildly, 45 glorious revolutions per minute of pure unadulterated garage-rock. It’s where we left The Wylde Tryfles on their last album, 2018’s Go Fuzz Yourself, and it’s exactly where they pick up once again. It’s pure Cynics crunching germanium fuzz, The Sonics locked on constant rotating bouts with Count Five. Straight out of the Nuggets playbook, revived and back from the grave, Fuzzed And Confused is a fantastic collection of the kind of revved-up snotty garage rock that has been blasting from cracked and cranked speakers the world over for almost six decades.
Straight out of the block they bolt with the cracking You’re Gonna Miss Me, a great take on the Kostelich/Kastelic brand of garage rock, flying through the blue train station with a psych swirl. It drops down mid-song into a brooding rumble before picking up once again and careering to a close. It’s one side of their rolling dice, rolling sixes and taking down the house. The following My Confuzzion brings in the more shimmering and shaking side of the genre. Quick little guitar licks chime out over the Seeds-like sparser rhythm. It’s a great update of The Elite’s My Confusion, injected with that classic fuzz sound. It’s a sound that Wylde Tryfles come back to again and again. And why not? It’s the glue that holds their sound together, the tight grooves allowing it to reign while the Hammond organ whips out spooky backdrops.
Their version of The Worst’s Creepy Thing brings a wild Halloween psych and psychotic night terror to the table, manic surf-garage, and the added harmonic flourishes on songs like Out Of Sight add another classic hue to the record already brimming with the crunch of The Troggs and Dave Davies’ spitting ripped speaker, the happy accident that created a whole new genre of rock. They throw in a great run through Willie Dixon’s I Just Wanna Make Love To You and, by the time they close proceedings with Get Outta My Way, you’re well and truly on their hook.
As Michael Hicks says in his book exploring sixties’ garage and psychedelia, it’s exactly in the dogged determination to stay within the strict confines of their style where the garage bands of the ’60s found the potential for the endless variety afforded to them by their minimal technique. That bands like The Wylde Tryfles, among many others, are able to continue to mine the depths of the genre so well while still maintaining a freshness to their songs is a testament to those bands that have paved the way. Never tiring, always revolving, Fuzzed And Confused, the band’s third album, is a great addition to the garage-rock canon. Or, as another band once put it, “It’ll make you jump. It’ll make you shout. It’ll even knock you out.”
Fuzzed And Confused is available directly from Soundflat, and in the UK from Rough Trade.