Trash Rock

Trash rock is a self-consciously crude strain of garage punk that fetishises 1950s and 1960s rock and roll, rockabilly and rhythm and blues, played fast, cheap and deliberately unpolished. The term was claimed by Switzerland's *The Monsters*, formed in 1986, and later anchored a Bay Area scene around the Total Trash festival. Practitioners use battered equipment, primitive three-chord songs and novelty-horror humour, treating incompetence as authenticity. Its canon reaches back to *The Cramps*, *The Gories* and *The Mummies*, bands that made a virtue of sounding, in the scene's own phrase, recorded in a garbage can.