The Trident—After Four Years, “It’s a Bank”

The Trident is a work at least four years in the making. Since their freshman year at Wesleyan University, Robby Hardesty ’12 and David Thompson ’11, under the cryptic moniker, “Chilly Phoenix,” rumoredly crafted upwards of 500 fully realized tracks, all produced in complete secrecy and silence, and performed solely for inanimate objects by means of muted, elaborate pantomime. Though widely acknowledged as spiritual leaders of Wesleyan’s music scene, Robby and David made few rock music appearances and did not draw attention to their efforts. In fact, the only known live performance of Chilly Phoenix was the famous surprise show at Usdan’s Orientation Week Open Mic night in 2009, accounts of which litter internet fan boards like greasy burger wrappers “On” Kerouac’s forever vanished “Road.” Instead, Robby and David collaborated with other Wesleyan heavyweights in juggernaut supergroups like The Walrus Hunters, Moon Bounce, and Mounce Bounce, and pretended to participate in various groups, “social life,” oppressive institutions, and academic shit. In hindsight, it is clear that this was nothing more than a Kierkegaardian ruse, employed by the two to deflect attention from their work on what is finally unveiled here—an album so powerful in its conception, so stunning in its execution, that upon hearing it one is left with nothing so much as the irresistible obligation to weep for those who departed the earth before it was released. “If Hardesty and Thompson had a child,” Howie Mandel is fond of saying, “it would certainly be me.”

The stash of Chilly Phoenix’s tightly guarded recorded material, fondly known as “the Hewitt Tapes” by the Wes music scene’s Those-In-The-Know, has, of course, acquired legions of passionate promoters. From Brooklyn to Seattle, devoted bootloogers scrounged together the limited rehearsal tapes, live video recordings, and a few scratch demos leaked by engineers to create what are now the widely circulated “Hewitt Mixes,” in order that the world might at least bear stunted witness to true rock genius. At long last, the wait has ended; the hushed, feverish arguments can be settled; at last, all anxiety and confusion can give way to the ecstasy of hearing The Trident as it was originally and perfectly conceived in 2007 by Hardesty and Thompson.

At once a profoundly tragic commentary on living in Great Recession America and a hopefully vapid ode to an idyllic past of Wells Fargo Wagons and arm-banded monocled moustauched turn-of-the-century men behind counters carefully counting out coins, The Trident effortlessly straddles the adjacent blood-family-feud-warring territories of love, hate, loneliness, togetherness, sociality, individuality, agony, ecstasy, women, men, chicks, dudes, biddies, broheims, Christopher Lee-fronted dragoncore, hardcore deepdish pornography, monied breasts, and, most chillingly of all, banks. At once profoundly sobering and inspiringly giddifying, The Trident succeeds in othering that which is most familiar and familiarizing the deepest abyss of the Other. And who cannot relate to such a move? Who has not felt both defamiliarized and inescapably at home amidst the network of behemoth investment banks that dot our chain(ed) landscape like the “Howl”’s of Ginsberg’s forever vanished “America”?

At once panegyric and defamation, singularity and panoply, The Trident soars to oxygenless heights (shattering not a few glass ceilings along the way!), and then dives, exquisitely peregrine, into the cold, black core of the human heart.

“Bank of America 1” is masterfully placed at the album’s commencement, opening as it does the door onto a post-post-modern world as only Chilly Phoenix could reveal it. Theirs is a world of dark light, of static dynamism, of differentiated similarity and unimaginable obviousnesses, and of Taco Hells. But above all, theirs is a world we all know, for in the final analysis, their world, in the end, is, when the dust settles, our own. After seeing the world as you see it, inescapably, over and over again, on Bank of America 1, you will never go back. “Bank of America,” cackles the demon; “Bank of America,” intones the angel. Stock market analysts will feverishly whisper while consulting their sullied charts that the contours of this canticle are the flawless and dissonantly mirrored images of the tumultuous throes that supply and demand has wrought on the DJIA’s once illustrious BAC. “I couldn’t believe it,” gasped Franz Furlich of sweaty Goldman Sachs. “I didn’t think you could capture a 95% decline in stock price with a single musical phrase, let alone anticipate it a full year-and-a-half beforehand, but fuck, these guys did it.”

Like “Meditations” in O’Hara’s forever vanished “Emergency,” “Bank of America 2,” heavily influenced by Zen philosophy and really absolutely valuable corporate team building exercises, sails like your favorite Mad Men episode into a quiet harbor and sends forth unnoticeable disturbances of ripples through your private parts. Thompson’s ballyhooing keys and Hardesty’s inaudible background whimpering leave little to the imagination (Ellen DeGeneres, after playing the song softly and backwards on repeat during her interview with Steven Purugganan, managed to stammer out, “Wow, this one just reaches out and, uh, well, it just makes you want to shit all over yourself.” Look out, Steven!).

In “Bank of America 3 (Live),” Hardesty and Thompson are at their most direct, and their most sharp. Vulnerable, they desperately cling to life’s “pennies…in jars” while offering their cherished love the only thing they can think of: “five billion euros.” Scholars have long debated how, precisely, one might fit such a sum “in between...toes,” with the battling factions reaching such a fever pitch in late April, 2009, that they rented out the basement of their convention-hosting hostel in Vienna and force-fed eleven “hookers” the entire contents of Austria’s national monetary holdings. Who won? Presumably Bank of America.

It goes without saying that “Bank of America 4” is The Trident’s climax, an anthem for the modern kids “Lost” like Stein’s forever vanished “Generation.” In fact, exactly like that. “Bank of America 4” is Chilly Phoenix’s magnum opus, their coup de grace, their le chien diabetique et malentendant. Renowned octogenarian rock writer Jeffribald Asshat once wrote in Pitching Stonefork, “It’s like taking “Born To Run,” “Don’t Stop Believin,’” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “The Real Slim Shady,” “Livin’ on a Prayer” and [Hoobastank’s] “The Reason,” rolling them into one record, watching that record become possessed by the spirit of Eddie Cantor and hearing his silly voice lope out like some Martian “Good Vibrations”—and shoving all of it into a box the size of a licorice stick.” The brutal sessions for “BoA 4” drove Hardesty and Thompson to the bitter falling-out in which Thompson supposedly uttered the oft-quoted, “This Class ain’t big enough for the both of us anymore, Robhorn.” (Most Chilly Phoenix scholars claim this story is apocryphal.) Now, here, it is presented in its full glory.

Finally, “Bank of America 5.” As Richard Rorty would suggest, if he had any balls left to suggest anything, “It’s Hegelian in a way that we didn’t even think things could be Hegelian. It’s like Hegel critiquing Marx’s critique of Hegel backwards in slow motion through some outer envelope of time.” Was ecstasy involved? Presumably not. In the long autumn of ’07 Hardesty and Thompson collectively adopted a non-hominid-sexual, Malay-chic, anything-but-ecstasy creative regimen -- and from within the bestial K-holes that they could not find themselves emerged a mastery by anger and the savage coked-out spirit of none other than the dreaded Bank, whose name demanded to be called.

What you are about to hear defies description; the preceding is as futile as The Trident is essential. “Nothing in the last forty years has been as wrought and filled with hot sauce,” Kelly Ripa was asked to say. And, as Drew Carey often posits at the end of “The Price Is Right,” after secretly mouthing “BoA 4”’s “charming” second stanza, “Sheer perfection? You’d be better off murdering a child than reducing this album to ‘sheer perfection.’” Turn on your high-fidelity speakers and rip the shit out of your bong, bro. And if you don’t have high-fidelity speakers, then maybe you ought to find a father whose brother owns Bank of America.