Trick and the Heartstrings

From the mean streets of Brooklyn comes the toughest, most show-stoppingest trio in the country, playing the music you want to dance to, serious as a heart attack. Rugged rhythm and blues with no effects, screeching falsettos, stop-on-a-dime sidestepping, pleading, shouting, cooing, hopeless wooing. They are Trick & the Heartstrings, and they’ve built a religious following in New York, Los Angeles—and smaller pockets across the globe—for their reputation of putting on a live show unrivaled in its melodramatic fervor.

Allegedly formed two years ago in a frigid Brooklyn winter, the Heartstrings began practicing “eight days a week” in monastic solitude, later emerging to reveal a spectacle that might only be described as an After-School Special meets Cirque du Soleil; Kurt Cobain meets “Purple Rain”. They claim to be very close friends “pulled together by tragic events” in the recent past, though the nature of these events has been withheld. Former classmates recall that front-man Alexander Gedeon was a blues guitar prodigy playing Jimi Hendrix solos by the age of twelve, distributing 4-track recordings of outlandish soul music (incorporating influences as disparate as Madonna and Erik Satie, The Germs and Curtis Mayfield) by fourteen. Completing the trio are drummer Texas Peter Hale, an imposing figure at 6’8”—whose unique style is strangely evocative of both Detroit Motown and Detroit House—and bassist L Young Huckman, whose melodic bass lines effortlessly steal the spotlight in many songs. Asked to identify the Heartstrings’ style and influences, Huckman stated: “I don’t know what kind of music we play, exactly…but soul music makes you feel good and I am not afraid to say that I want to make you feel good.”
“I had a dream that you might come to our show,” Trick once intimated, “and you would hear our music and you would actually want to dance without being told to, that you might scream back in comisery [sic] with my secrets and lies and that it would be a special night and you’d remember it for a long time.” And for now, earnestly or not, he’s succeeding. Their performance is simultaneously cruel and alarmingly intimate, a bright celebration of the golden day you cut class in high school, alongside the dark recognition that you may never be that happy again for the rest of your life. Costumed and choreographed like a neighborhood gang from a city that never existed, they reel through their canon of heartbreak-themed anthems, from “We’re the Hardest” to “Getting High With My Girlfriend” (“I used to have a mother / On whom I could depend / Now I’m getting high / With my girlfriend”). They perform with a delightful ignorance that there are certain intense personal issues that perhaps should not be discussed in public: “I don’t care if there’s a knife in your back,” Trick screams, “I’ll never, never, never come back crying to you!”

The Heartstrings are dead-set on burning down the house, wielding an arsenal that will very likely end them up in jail. At the greedy demand of an encore, Trick turns the tables, implicating the audience in a far greater crime of desertion, abandonment: “U Were the One”, a brief, grim meditation on three gritty notes, underscoring Trick’s bloodcurdling cry “Can’t You See / That you were the one who left me?” In the house, hands cover mouths half-laughing, half-gasping; some actually shout back in response to the lyrics, enraptured beyond suspension of disbelief…caught up in the web of what might just be true love.