Golden Triangle’s trash can cabaret

It’s difficult to capture the Brooklyn-based six-piece Golden Triangle’s sound in easy terms. Normal rock adjectives don’t apply to its noisy clutter of aggressive, art-punk exorcisms. The group’s presence gives rise to a jumble of trash can art jams and cabaret visuals that aren’t cut from the same garage-rock cloth that binds the roster supported by Rob’s House Records, which issued Golden Triangle’s “Prize Fighter,” “Red Coats” b/w “Night Brigade” 7-inch in 2007.

“When we started this band, we were tired of going to shows where people stood around looking bored and watching bands that looked like they were bored to be performing,” says vocalist/tambourine player and former Atlanta resident Vashti Windish. “We wanted to do something that would get a party atmosphere started, get people moving and do something that was a lot more fun and interesting than just standing around, playing songs and looking morose.”

Fellow Atlanta expatriates bass player Alix Brown (the Lids, Angry Angles) and guitarist Cameron Michel, along with O.J. San Felipe (guitar), Nick Ray (drums, vocals) and Carly Rabalais (vocals, tambourine), accomplish the spectacle. Dual female vocalists Windish’s and Rabalais’ placement at the front of the stage evokes the B-52’s ultimate party band dynamic. But in action, their songs create an atmosphere that feels more like a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The three songs on the 7-inch are barreling and baroque morphine punk mantras. Each one gives a slurred, sonic nod to ’80s outsiders the Gun Club, These Immortal Souls and the Bush Tetras with a bratty, gothy plod. The songs aren’t quite kitsch and they aren’t quite punk rock, but a dark merger of sounds conjured from somewhere in between. “I don’t know what to call what we do,” Windish says. “It’s evolving, but where it’s all headed, nobody knows.”