Parks on Fire

This is a song by a group that I discovered completely by accident. No one put me on to them, no one had it playing and I heard it by accident, and I had never heard the group mentioned in passing…EVER! It was one of those nights where I was home alone, up late, and trolling the internet for music and I stumbled upon Trifonic and their song “Parks on Fire”. It grabbed me from the second I heard it. Trifonic is comprised of two guys, brothers Brian and Lawrence Trifon based out of San Francisco and they have a way with tying sounds and melodies together that comes across almost cinematic. I’m surprised they haven’t been pegged to score a movie or two yet. Growing up Brian wanted to be a heavy metal star and mastered the guitar in the process while his older brother Lawrence was all about hip hop and wrote his first rap at the age of five. Somewhere along the way they bothers failed at their individual musical goals and decided to meld their talents and I for one am happy they did.

Their debut album Emergence which dropped in 2008 had 11 songs that each had their own personality like “Broken” and it's heartbreaking lilting lyrics or “Infiltration” and it's haunting groove. The song that spoke to me the loudest though was “Parks”. It starts off pretty mysterious and ominous, you can hear a match being lit and then bass line comes roaring in followed by a cacophony of sounds, noises, and percussion. The rhythm catches almost immediately and then the most interesting instrumentation I have ever heard comes in. It sounds like someone figured out how to play a stretched out rubber band. Then the song settles into a really sweet melodic period losing all it’s angst and aggression. Before you worry that the song is going to fade out all nice and melodic the tension re-emerges towards the end where the plucking and stretching sounds come back in (how did they make THAT sound?). The song rumbles along like a flight dealing with bad turbulence. It rolls along with the bassline and the beat playing off of each other and other intruments sounding as if they're in distress as they build and clash into each other. All this until it comes in for the soft landing settling into that beautiful melody again and taxiing to the gate.

This is a song to be played and be heard on your big boy speakers. I say that so you can hear the range, the depths, and all the interesting sounds as they were meant to be heard. I think this song rocks, let me know if you agree. And if you do, friend them on facebook cause they're really cool.