Here are a just a few of the fine things they've written about Thomas's live shows and "Full Moon Over Wowtown" (see also 'Audio Addiction' reviews page):

"Thomas Truax is that rare beast - a total one-off." -Martin Lilleker, Sheffield Telegraph

"There are a few, very few, artists so original and inspired that their creativity slops right over the edges of their music and floods the whole damned room. What Thomas Truax leaves on the floor for the waitress to mop up is a better brew than most people put right there on the table. Smart, beautiful, eccentric, exceptional -- if these are the kinds of words you attach to the music you love best, you need to drop whatever you're doing and get this album right now." - -Jennifer Kelly, SPLENDID (Click here to read this whole review)

"A real and singular talent." -David Pollock, the List

"A mixture of gothic fantasy, vaudeville and mad-genius invention. He’s the most unique and interesting one man band that I have ever seen and endlessly fascinating to watch." -Helen O' Sullivan, egigs.co.uk (May '07)

"Good as Sunnyvale were, they are completely blown off the stage tonight by New York Antifolk genius, Thomas Truax ... Accompanied on stage by his home made touring buddies, Sister Spinster and the Hornicator (both indescribably brilliant home made instruments) Thomas Truax gives a lesson in how to combine original thought, beautiful melody and still remain achingly trendy. Each and every track is greeted with whooping applause from an enraptured audience. It is very hard to point to stand out tracks but 'Full Moon Over Wowtown' the title track from his current album is particularly brilliant. Another example from this criminally neglected New York scene..." Jon Surtees, BBC Oxford (review of live Oxford show w/ Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element April 6, '04)

"One of the more accomplished 'Hornicator' players around."

-The Village Voice

"In a conventional world, Thomas is a superhero of nonconformity."

-Ged M. SoundsXP Aug, '06

"It’s dark in the Cellar Bar, unusually dark, apart from an illuminated mini-spinning jenny and a man with multi-colored badges on his fingers. This is like, so early 1970’s. This is edgy, real edgy. This is Thomas Truax. A one man band with only his DIY instruments for friends...
The whole experience bordered on the surreal, what we all imagine an art-house experience should be like... Like listening to Bjork making love to Stephan Hawking. Not only was the music reminiscent of a mechanical Captain Beefheart, but the lyrics also possessed the story telling of Tom Waits crossed with the eccentricity of Jonathan Richman. Thomas Truax is an antifolk hero. Not only that, but he used to be a stop-motion animator on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch! This guy is the geek who came cool..."

-Giles Turner, Porter Cellar Live Reviews June 05

"When Tom Waits wondered "What's He Building?" on 1999's Mule Variations, he might have been snooping on singer-songwriter Thomas Truax." -Kurt B. Reighley, The Stranger (Seattle) 10/05

" Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club have one thing in spades: promise. Two years ago, they played in Chapter Arts Centre, just down the road - and were godawful. Tonight, they’re in Ifor Bach and they’re very good. Just not great. Yet. The misfit magician Thomas Truax is already great, however. It’s nigh-impossible to describe the experience of his homemade pop-punk-folk with added contraptions to someone who hasn’t seen it. Rest assured, though, that it’s something truly special: electric-powered drum machines made out of pram wheels and tiny beaters accompany horn-drum-microphones and self-repeating string bongos almost make the songs seem like an afterthought. Almost. Weird and wonderful Burton-esque fairytales frame stories of loneliness and paranoia, but it’s the one new song which is truly surprising: a bile-filled rant against a New York dominated by Starbucks, it’s as far away from songs like ‘Prove it to my Daughter’ and ‘The Fish’ as you could ever expect Mr Truax to go, and makes you wonder just how much longer he’s willing to keep up this life of travelling from place to place with no-one but his mechanical companions... There really is no-one quite like him out there today: you must see him while you still can."

-Kev Eddy, godisinthetv review of show at Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, 6th Oct. 06

"He merges a fevered imagination, solid songwriting abilities and a groovy showbiz attitude with a mad scientist's brain...darkly witty songs accompanied by weird Harry Partch-esque home made instruments. Very groovy indeed." - Richard Sanderson, Resonance FM , London

"Hey you, in the cider-baptised pulpit, seducing Our Father with your fine line in lupine falsetto and wry rock....You are stupendous." -Nicola Meighan, Plan B Magazine 2/05(Click here to read this whole review)

"Brilliantly weird...in the same way that a play in The Big Picture
is called off, off, off Broadway, Thomas Truax is alt, alt, alt country." -Joe-John Coxhead, gigwise.com10/06

"Well, if ever there was a reason for live music, it’s native New Yorker Thomas Truax... there are no surplus band members to put a microphone near a barking dog or play a selection of bizarre percussion instruments. He does it all himself. Literally, even down to making his electro-acoustic instruments!...
But no amount of wacky gadgets and bizarre music will make an artist ‘good’. Thomas Truax also throws into the mix a knack for writing great lyrics, his ability to command an audience’s attention and his talent for making people laugh. It is all this and more that makes him good...
As Thomas Truax makes his own instruments I have no option but to invent my own language to sum up what he’s all about…
Asdeancer shloper sú diod hibby. Schi! Schi! Schi!, cruggy, fregythipoid, psychumatical end bibliograttic! BLENDIBBLE!" -Mike Spall, southscene.net

"...It's a bewildering melange of garage rock songs, avant garde sounds and cabaret showtunes, full of whistles, toy piano, ice cream chimes and invented instruments... with shades of Tom Waits' storytelling, Nick Cave's theatricality and Lux Interior's howling-at-the-moon madness. There's even yodelling on 'Shooting Stars'. That moon reference is significant as this is a sort of concept album tribute to the moon as it shines on the fictional Wowtown. Its all done in a larger than life, cartoonish way...You get the feeling that its too large a world to be contained in a small silver disk. Its a soundtrack to a film that might never be made but the mind pictures that it conjures are so evocative that maybe it doesn't need to be..." -Ged M, SoundsXP 2/04 Read the full review by going here.

"To focus on his creative gadgetry is to do an injustice to his music, his songs haemorrhage beauty as his gangly figure clatters on stage, like the skeleton of Elvis possessed by Otis Lee Bradshaw. ...it's incredible - unique, beautiful and f*cking scary..." - Jonathan Falcone, Do Something Pretty Fanzine (read this whole live review from a Nov. 03 show in Brighton)

"And as if that wasn't enough he then pulled out this weird trumpet thing called the Horninator which was more akin to a William Burroughs style hallucination than an instrument..." -ProperTop.com

"Thomas Truax is a genius and stops at nothing to write a thoroughly original and, moreover, entertaining song... To all intents and purposes, the music...is certainly not for the faint-hearted - and most definitely not for the narrow-minded. Mr. Truax's music has it all: good humour, serious contemplation, unsettling melodies and anthemically uplifting vibes. He is one of the most original songwriters I've heard who genuinely takes pride in allotting copious amounts of time for the crafting of his songs. 'Full Moon Over Wowtown' is one album you really must hear for yourself and spread the word about." -Steve Rudd, In Dreams Records ( read the whole review here)

"In Truax's hands music is merely a vessel for his scattershot imagination, earning him a place in a lineage that includes Captain Beefheart and Viv Stanshall and, latterly, a less-frenetic Liars. Equal parts music-hall, avant-garde and garage rock, 'Full Moon Over Wowtown' is far more accessible than these references imply, thanks chiefly to Truax's lycanthropic bark... and his obvious love of primal rock 'n' roll. Had the bands that exploded out of CBGB's in '76 been inspired by LSD rather than cheap speed one suspects that the results would have been disturbingly like this, and that today's bands hell-bent on recycling those days would be more interesting as well as a hell of a lot better." -Alan Downes, LOGO Magazine (UK)

"...From the moment first act Thomas Truax ambles laconically onto stage with what appears to be a gramophone attached to his mouth, it is apparent that times have changed down in the Village... The gramophone type thing turns out to be a homemade contraption Truax has christened "The Hornicator" - an unholy amalgamation of a tuba and a harp, which he proceeded to utilise as a weird kind of vocal modulator throughout his eccentrically playful set. Combining fractured hillbilly folk with avant noise terrorism, Truax was about as far from conventional solo acoustica as possible, and was all the better for it..." -Duncan Forgan, Edinburgh Evening News 11/11/03

"July's Akoustik Anarkhy gave us the gig of the year with New York anti-folk star Thomas Truax bamboozling the crowd with home-made instruments, painting entire towns in the space of a single song and performing seemingly-impossible live sample loops." -From a Manchester Online Article on the Soft Priest.

"When Thomas Truax, Sister Spinster and the Hornicator took to the stage, the audience was ready for anything at all. His songs are of course, funny, weird, original, narrative and thoroughly enjoyable from the thrift store shoes that take the customer on a crime spree to the gothic comic horror of Full Moon Over Wowtown. The audience loved it, laughing at his homemade instruments when they worked and when they didn't with Thomas keeping everyone entertained while he set and reset these musical inventions. First class stuff....One of the gigs of the year." -Clare Kember, TotallyRadio.com (review of 12 Bar Club show, London, Nov. 30 '03)

" Exceptionally-crafted songs of a decidedly eclectic nature. ... Truax's astonishing ambition fills these tightly-written songs with a sense of wild abandon. That paradox is what makes me want to spend a lot more time with this puppy." -Jon Worley, Aiding and Abetting

"Thomas Truax's brand of folk bounds between noirish, Gothic (but not Goth) twists and pretty moments. Tonight, Truax -unquestionably the highlight on this bill- celebrates the release of his new CD, Full Moon Over Wowtown (Psycho Teddy), which injects new energy into the dark, carnivalesque sort of music that always gets compared to Tom Waits." -TIMEOUT New York Critic's Pick Jan 25, '03

"Strange layers of blues and rock created on homemade machines and inventions...genius!!!" -Lloyd Ellis, moondoglovesyou.com

"You've got to love Thomas Truax.Not just because he plays grimy pieces of American grotesquery, like a nice neat Tom Waits after a truckfull of Lockets, but because of his wonderful home-made instruments. Sister Spinster is a clanking mechanical drum machine, based around an old pram wheel, and is the sort of thing that might have transpired had Harry Partch been involved in designing the Roland 707. I'm not even going to begin to describe The Hornicator (part instrument, part sculpture, part headgear) but I'll tell you that when it goes through a giant delay pedal, it sounds like Portishead as produced by Wilf Lunn from "The Great Egg Race". Over these queasy, lurching rhythms we find twisted vignettes about the fictional Wowtown.

Now, if there were any justice in the world Truax would have a huge hit, and perform "The Fish" on TOTP, and every kid would have a Wowtown T-shirt. Then, to make this fantasy even remotely plausible, heÕd be instantly forgotten, and, in twenty years, the ability to recognise a Hornicator would be pop quiz gold-dust. Like correctly spelling "Sk8rboi". A beautiful, hilarious, and joyful performance." -David Murphy, OHM Magazine(Oxford)April '04 (review of April 6 Show at Oxford Cellar)

"... decorated with yodelling, rocket noises and everything in between (which is a lot). A curious treat." - Dom M, Decode Magazine (Summer '04)

More Live reviews and lively mentions:

Real Brighton Review of Po Na Na, Brighton show w/ Bobby Conn March 29 '04

Rock City UK, Nottingham Nov. 03

Sound SXP Strange Fruit Festival 03, London...

Kitten Painting reviews Strange Fruit Festival 03, London...

Some nice Photos from that show on Underexposed

Bands speak about highlights of Truckfest 03 on Drowned In Sound

Terrorsex Cabaret feature on Starvox

Sandman Magazine live review Sheffield July 03(pdf)

Manchester Online reviews Nov. 03 show

A review of a London gig w/ Schwervon! in French: LeCargo.org