Upsetta Films is pleased to announce the upcoming release of their first non caribbean music video, “Trashman” by Providence, RI’s Cactus Attack – from the band’s current LP, Freeborn and Forlorn.
The HD Music Video for Cactus Attack’s “Trashman” will premier on Wednesday, October 29 (On CactusAttackMusic.com – UpsettaFilms.com and various Social Media Networks)! In preparation for the release of the “Trashman” HD Music Video, Cactus Attack and Upsetta Films have just released a promotional trailer (see below – or above).
Cactus Attack’s “Trashman” Music Video was written (with an assist from the band members), directed, filmed and edited by Upsetta Films’ Dubee, Chancellor and Original King, in Studio Blue in Providence, RI. Cactus Attack’s “Trashman” HD Music Video is Upsetta Films’ “rock” music video … though to get a more accurate feel for Cactus Attack and the song “Trashman,” you should read the excerpt below by long time friend of Cactus Attack, Tommy Dean.
Like an amphetamine-fueled colt, Cactus Attack hauled ass right out of the gate, playing their original brand of home-brewed bluegrass in every basement, barroom, kitchen, and coffee shop that would give them entrance. They soon conjured an eager-eared listenership who dug the stomping raucousness and sonic cacophony that came to characterize their live set.
It only took a couple years for Cactus Attack to polish up a record-worthy repertoire, and in 2009 they released their first album, a self-titled LP that was recorded by students at the New England Institute of Art in Boston. The album was a faithful reflection of the band’s wide-eyed beginner phase. Tracks like “Catfish,” “Dean,” and “Power Lines,” touched on themes that ranged from the frustration of youth to the futility of love to the inevitability of death, while songs like “I Forgot My Ears Again” were sensibly nonsensical, and demonstrated the band’s willingness to experiment.
Nearly four years later, in 2013 Cactus Attack followed up their freshman effort with the Track Marks EP. The slow-tempo concept record, in four (or five?) songs, tracked a nameless man’s downward spiral, starting with his heartbreak and ending with his multiple familial homicides. The album reeked of death, notably the soft-spoken piano parts (appropriately recorded in a church) and it signaled a darker turn in the band’s style.
Cactus Attack’s recently released Freeborn and Forlorn is straight bourbon and black coffee; ten tight tracks rambling into the recesses of the everyman’s hopes and despairs. The title song, along with the record’s premiere number “Railroad,” play on the usual Americana themes, incurring an aura of bucolic bliss and quixotic wanderlust. “Whiskey Bottle” and the “Liver Song” are indomitable anthems of drunken revelry, while “Anything You Need” and the drawling “100 Proof” are testaments to the dark side of vice and love (one usually being the cause and effect of the other). “Theodore” is a heartfelt number that depicts the devastating effects of warfare on a young man’s psyche from the perspective of a loving father, and “Donny” is perhaps its polar opposite, a circus portrayal of a cocaine-addled friend played at a white-lined tempo.
A stand out track on Freeborn is “Trash Man.” The number plays like being dragged slowly over hot gravel while suffering a hellish hangover. Brennan takes vocal duties, and in his drawling voice, he paints the pain, crooning that the “Blues burns like the sunshine when it dries the water up.” It’s the perfect last call song on those nights when alcohol has become an anesthetic for the miserly existence of boss men and dead love. “Trash Man” has a constant current of barebones banjo and percussion, and is alternately layered with distorted guitar and bluesy solos. It gets heavier, then lighter, then heavier, but always maintains a foot-dragging, lurching pace.
The current Cactus Attack catalog shows a band that is constantly growing, never resting on the laurels of rowdy cheers and an expanding fan base, making the time-tested genre of this distinctly American art form exciting again. These boys remain testaments to the fact that skill is a fraction of the victory—to truly win at this thing called music, you need to really feel it, and to make the guy in the front row feel it to. In our age of posturing, posing, and petty bullshit, it’s noteworthy to have an act in our ranks that eschews pretension in favor of giving it to us straight. New grass, blue grass, country, folk, American, whatever man, labels are just words, and words are all we have to describe the feeling we get when a band, like Cactus Attack, channels the human condition directly into our hearts, heads, and guts every goddamn time they take the stage. And to that effect, they have won. Hell, we’ve all won.
Cheers boys!
—Tommy Dean
