There are a few reasons to hate the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. They're 'quirky' (see above), and put one in mind of those students (female) who neglect to throw away the childish things, and prance about with Tigger pencil cases, making people watch Disney films. They're a family band, and there are few good examples of this almost-defunct genre. And, most annoying of all, the music is deliberately shoddy - the daughter, who plays drums, can barely sing. But, when you get past this, you're left with some of the best comedy music of the decade.
The album contains 5 'pop' songs, and a concept album based around slides from a McDonald's conference in 1977. This sounds like a hard-sell, but the songs are all pearls. The music is reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and ABBA, but, as they write songs based on found slides, the lyrics necessarily veer between subjects in a jarring way. The opener, 'Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959', draws a line between the behaviour of tourists and capital punishment in post-WWII Japan. 'Eggs' looks at the American 1970s in the round, taking in the Brady Bunch and the brutal end of the Vietnam War. 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' and 'European Boys' deal with the strained relationship between Europe and America, the latter ending with the staggering couplet "European wars, are American wars/Going to France, do you gotta wear those trousers?". Each of the songs mentions the problems of the late-20th/early-21st century's 'hyperpower' in a way that becomes in itself comic - you listen, waiting for them to return to the subject, and without fail, they do. By the time Jason Trachtenburg notes "Agent Orange, Blue, and Red" in 'Eggs', the point is well and truly made.
'The McDonald's Suite' provides a grimly comic experience - hearing the woes of one of the world's most ubiquitous corporations and their plan to dominate the market for crap food, you feel uncomfortably close to the inner workings of what was to become grand power. Most of the songs in the 'Suite' are funny because of the juxtaposition of grandiose pop with garbled CEO speak (one of the lyrics in 'What Will The Corporation Do?' is "We need more advertising to tell our story and keep hamburgers before our customers"). But the song 'Together As a System, We are Unbeatable', while a toe-tapping, good-time tune, is genuinely unnerving. It gives us, through a filter, the multi-national's private self-image, something that McDonald's keep well hidden, prefering nowdays to talk about the 'bits of real chicken breast' in their nuggets, which begs the question of what the fuck was in their nuggets before.
Oddly for this post-vinyl age, the album itself is worth owning, as it contains some of the slideshows used in their live performances, which helps make sense of the music (YouTube is a decent substitute for some). Some of the jokes are lost without these - the sadly unlinkable 'Fondue Friends in Switzerland' contains frequent references to pictures of a parade, which, without having seen the pictures, falls flat. All that, and only a penny on Amazon.
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