Traps PS, Bottled Up & Rx

Traps Ps

Bottled Up
Jangly and glamorous, Bottled Up’s freaked-up art pop is a smoothie of frontman Nikhil Rao’s key obsessions: Suburban Lawns, italo disco, Alan Vega, Television (the band), television (the appliance), Andy Warhol, the entire decade of the ‘80s, Prince’s particular shade of plum purple, his old Tascam 8-track, Factory Records. Indian-American by way of Oakland and LA, Rao’s the dude-who’s-seen-it-all meets dude-about-town. A sound designer and audio engineer by trade – professionally schooled in the art of film & video game scoring- Rao’s a man informed first by the sort of his journeying one’s got to do when faced with the darknesses of addiction and a twisty adolescence in and out of religious cults.

For all of its gleaming guitars and glossy euro-flavored synthwork, Bottled Up’s filled with the mental residue one’s gets after asking the void to fuck off. 
 Co-led with Colin Kelly – a disciple of D.C.’s avant-analog scene – joined by Michael Mastrangelo and Beth Cannon on dueling guitars, and supplanted by Rao’s wunderkid brother, Rohit, on acid-jazz-does-punk drums, Bottled Up conjures the sort of psycho-potpurri-spirit that’s only given to the sort of band that’s able to conjure a vision of the things they love, the mountains they’ve overcome, and mutate it all into something you can dance to.

Rx