Bacon Wagon – Trauma Cake Review

Noise rock n00bs Bacon Wagon are a trio of Swedish scoundrels not as “n00” to the scene as you might think. From the ashes of disbanded noise act Acid Ape, siblings Marcus and Kristoffer Kinberg arose like Porky the Phoenix and formed Bacon Wagon in 2003. After numerous guitarist auditions, some instrument swapping, and finally finding its third with drummer Peter Johansson in 2006, Bacon Wagon released a couple of splits and an EP before going dark in 2008. While not entirely unproductive in the interim, the trio reunited in 2023 and wrote a slew of new songs that serve as the basis for Bacon Wagon‘s Reptile Records debut album, Trauma Cake. With a Marcus Kinberg cover that had me reaching for a pair of 3-D glasses to keep my eyes straight, I settled down with Bacon Wagon‘s first proper release in twenty-two years, wondering whether eating this particular dessert before dinner would be worth it.

Bacon Wagon in 2025 sounds like an early-aughts garage band trying its best to channel the raucous, late-80s, early-90s-era milieu dominated by Steve Albini projects and the Am Rep roster. Whipped up with equal parts Hammerhead flour, Melvins sugar, Butthole Surfers butter, and Black Flag eggs, baked, then paired with a cold glass of Cows milk, Trauma Cake is a rowdy period piece reflective of its ingredients. Album opener “Tar Salad,” with its screechy, feedback-as-riff intro that gives way to a chest-beating rocker that serves as an aperitif, foreshadowing much of what Trauma Cake has to offer. Marcus Kinberg’s guitars, awash in reverb and fuzz, sans any stoner entanglements, bounce around with Kristoffer’s punk-bully bass lines with loads of King Buzzo-like, grunge-sludgy goo (“Lady Cramps,” “Honey! (I’m Home),” “Bear of a Man”). Johansson pounds the skins with Crover-Grohl power, beating both on and off-tempo beats while keeping things in line. Brothers Kinberg share the mic and steep the Bacon Wagon vocal blitz in loads of sarcastically pompous smarm and snarkumstance. Bacon Wagon keeps its tongue firmly cheeked with an immature attitude that conjures some fun moments, but I’m just not convinced 2025 is the most relevant time for Trauma Cake.

Dumb in a way that doesn’t necessarily mean bad; there’s nothing Bacon Wagon does on Trauma Cake that will have you diving deep into the recesses of your psyche looking for answers. Low-brow and unthought-provoking tracks pulse with punky, chunky energy (“A Voodoo That Actually Works,” “I-Beam”) and lurch about like drunken college students after too many cheap keg beers. Bacon Wagon plays music perfect for sweaty basement venues shrouded in clouds of cigarette smoke, besotted with puddles full of piss and solo-cup spillage. With little in the way of innovation, it’s as though Bacon Wagon recorded Trauma Cake in a time capsule, keeping any modernity at arm’s length while embracing a musical period in time that did not need a retro movement, thereby tapping into a mysterious, underground zeitgeist, like some pre-Sub Pop Nirvana demo.

While the grungier side of Trauma Cake mostly works, the noisy parts detract and, in some cases, are just downright annoying. The biggest offender, “Love Blister,” is as painful to listen to as it would be to pop. With its slow plod of overly fuzzed bass work, Kinberg-squared’s vocals are cartoonishly swoopy and out of tune, as are most of the guitar chords and leads, which screech along before the song ends in a grinding, sustained vocal that recalls Jim Carey’s ‘most annoying sound in the world’ from Dumb and Dumber. And while Trauma Cake only clocks in at a lean thirty-three minutes, by the time “I-Beam” squeals to a close, giving over to the shrieky feedback of “Brown Gravy,” it feels like you’ve spent a lot more time with Bacon Wagon than you have. Lacking any real dynamic detours, the constant and deliberate songwriting approach and execution cause ear fatigue to set in, further blurring the lines of what Trauma Cake is doing into a fuzzy slog.

Better served had it been released in the early 2000s, Trauma Cake is an excellent example of too little, too late. Bacon Wagon‘s wheels have been rolling in the same direction since 2003, and while they aren’t a bad band, they’re just not bringing anything original or exciting to the table. Fans of the mentioned bands will get some enjoyment from Bacon Wagon. But for a genre and era of music that has yet to experience a renaissance, Trauma Cake will not be the record to revitalize it.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Reptile Records
Website: Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: June 6th, 2025