Three Days Dark: “Art beyond the vagaries of fashion”
Alejandro De Luna
Meet Trent Halliday, ex-member of the extinct London-based garage band, Deep Sea Green and Three Days Dark´s commander in chief, a guitar-oriented solo project that relies comfortably on 60´s psychedelia overlapped with dirty thick layers of blues, tons of reverbs, fuzz and garagesque madness that work out as evocative landscapes through the pure and classic essence of rock ‘n’ roll.
Constantly writing music; currently living in the Essex county as an outsider and a loner within the music industry affairs and inspired lyrically by “nature, psychology, the sound of trees, the sun, myth, theology, love and modernity” – in words of its creator, Three Days Dark is “essentially psychedelic rock, but with eclecticism and variety, as if you were journeying through a musical psychology, a mental landscape of sound and song.” And indeed they are gratifying reminiscences to early Floyd; the psych and classic rock guitar-driven heroes like Blue Cheer, The Yardbirds, Cream, The Byrds, The Who and The Pretty Things. But despite the comparisons, in Three Days Dark, there is a refreshing sound immortalized in recorded noise last winter.
Trent Halliday lives on “a steady diet of Tom Waits, Os Mutantes and The Flaming Lips” but without leaving behind obscurities like Tuba Skinny – “a nice 1920´s New Orleans styles jazz band”, Terakft – “a kind of psychedelic Malian desert group”, and the likes of Kurt Vile, Hookworms, Foxygen and the Mexican garage/shoegaze from Lorelle Meets The Obsolete. Overwhelmed by the 60´s “surprise and dynamism” of psychedelic studio-based opera albums such as Floyd´s Piper At The Gates and The Pretty Things´sS.F. Hollow, Trent relies on classic rock heroes for developing his art: influenced in the six strings by Dick Dale´s “twangy lines, high reverb and Spanish inspired tremolo picking” guitar style and the “scrappy drunken-master kind of styles of Marc Ribot when playing for Tom Waits”, and vocally favouring “the great blues, jazz and soul singers like Nina Simone, Billy Holiday, Otis Reading and baritones like Morrison, Nick Cave and Tom Waits.”
Three Days Dark debut album was recorded in its entirety by the man himself with “just three microphones on the whole kit” as an attempt to recreate the sound on early recordings and with a production described as “airy, bright, surf orientated, with lots of maximalism and over-saturation”. In this outstanding solo album released independently, Trent Halliday had a whole well-formed concept behind the final achievement: “I liked the idea that the whole thing was a symphonic song, each song being just a part of a larger movement, but capable of standing alone. That’s pretty much what a lot of the great 60’s psychedelic albums attempted”. And it seems that he did not fail. If you listen carefully through the whole album, the distinct elements filled with psychedelic guitar passages in each track are sonic bridges that lead the composition into transitions of harmony and sonic variations within each song.
You need some proof? Tracks like the opening “Hey!” that could easily fit as the song that The Black Keys let go or never managed to conceive; “The breaks” as a piece of dirty blues that leads into a heartrending guitar solo; “It´s easy to say”, full of reverbs and fluctuations within almost 6 minutes of experimentation; the druggies and 60s-esques “Sunblushed”/“Come black blue sky” or “The Waves Awake”, a 10 minute long epic, with a start reminiscent to Neu!´s “Negativland” that explodes into a Ron Asheton-like dirty guitar sound and proto-punk´s garage madness.
Three Days Dark´s debut album just came out in a physical format and despite the future is still blurry, is also certainly promising: “Hopefully I’ll get a live band together to perform it sometime this year. I may even sneak out some B-sides, remixes, and dare I say a little EP of new material by the end of the year. I’m also writing a book over the course of this year, which requires a lot of reading and research, and possibly some illustration”.
Before Trent prepares another cup of tea, he leaves with a final thought that could easily work as a simile for Three Days Dark: “You hear every few years that guitar music is dead, but maybe what people mean is that it’s no longer gaining much favour with whoever is seen to be setting the perceived fashions. Ultimately, real art is art that lives and continues to live beyond the vagaries of fashion.”
