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Since first bonding over Slowdive at a Texas karaoke bar six years ago, musicians Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez have grown Trauma Ray into Fort Worth's foremost flag bearer of crushing shoegaze. A five-piece rounded out by bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt, the band's debut album, 'Chameleon', captures their evolving sound at an apex of majestic devastation. A fusion of downer hooks, gauzy melancholia, and bulldozer riffs, the album heaves and crashes across 50 minutes of stacked amplifier alchemy. Lyrically the songs trace similarly lofty and brooding terrain; Avila says InchThe theme is death. And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms.Inch'Chameleon' opens with InchEmber,Inch dreamy and distant, alternately anthemic and apocalyptic, defeated and deafening. Lead single InchBishopInch perfectly encapsulates Trauma Ray's depth and dimension, ripping out of the gate with Inchthe biggest, baddest, saddest wall of sound.Inch Lyrics about being burnt at the stake and Inchtossed in the flameInch float above a stop-start assault of precision distortion, eventually expanding into a rich, heavy, sorrowful end coda. InchSpectreInch isa mysterious, introspective dirge, envisioned as a Inchmellow, slowcore, Duster-thing,Inch all feeling and heavy fuzz chords (with no lead guitar). Avila wrote it, Inchto be a hymnalInch from the perspective of someone who won't let go - a ghost, an ex, a shadow self.Although the album is rich with subtleties, graceful lulls, and Inchbreaths of air,Inch the band's three guitar attack is it's defining force, a power flexed to it's peak on InchBardo.Inch Perez's intentions were blunt InchI wanted to write a riff that was hard as F**k.Inch The result is alternately mean and eerie, veering between noisy one string bends and surging headbang, mapping a middle ground b
