Jeff Trott – Dig Up The Astroturf   (DVD-Audio)

 

Music: B     MLP 5.1: B+     DTS: B     Dolby (2.0 only): B-     Extras: D

 

 

What might you get if you mix post-Beatles, semi-psychedelic Pop, with some New Wave and modern electronic trickery?  One possibility is Dig Up The Astroturf, Jeff Trott’s 2001 solo effort issued through DTS Entertainment.  DTS has had a knack for picking distinctive artists to grace their relatively new music label and Trott is no exception.

 

If the sound is not enough to pin his influence, listen to light rocker Dalai Lama.  You can immediately hear the good taste this guy has.  Trott wrote or co-wrote all ten tracks, including Maybe That’s Something with Sheryl Crow, but the character Crow offers here comes mostly through the lyrics more than the actual arrangement.  The pictures that accompany the DVD-Audio booklet and menus try to conjure up outer space and trips (to be) taken there.  However, in keeping with a collaborator like Crow, much of the material is still surprisingly acoustic.

 

Trott is also a capable-enough vocalist, though trying to sound like the late 1960s/early 1970s sensitive male vocalists of the time, which his phrasing is similar to.  He is not-unlike Matthew Sweet.  He still has enough range and empathy to convince the listener of what he is singling.  However, the material never exceeds these parameters, no matter how consistent Trott is.

 

The disc offers three soundtracks, best of all which is a 48 kHz/24bit Meridian Lossless Packing 5.1 high-definition mix for DVD-Audio players, which has a decent arrangement.  The DTS 48 kHz/24bit 5.1 mix is pretty much the same, if not with the smoothness and fullness.  A Dolby Digital 2.0 mix is the poorest of the three easily, but is here for PC/DVD-ROM users who cannot access the better tracks.  DTS does this for backwards compatibility, but fared better later with PCM CD 2.0 Stereo.

 

The other musicians should also be given credit for making this 10-track set sound so good, especially in 5.1, which offers these tracks:

 

Walk a Cloud

Cosmonaut

Dalai Lama

Good Luck Club

The Few That Remain

Atomic Halo

No Substitute

Maybe That’s Something

Nevermind Me

Hard To Say

 

This is a good listen if you are interested in a throwback to the aforementioned.  Let’s see what Trott does next.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo