Album Review: Pile - Green and Gray

“I’m hung up on being untethered in a way that agrees with me,” coos Rick Maguire on “Hair.” His band Pile are on a hot streak, releasing three LPs and a b-sides collection in just five years. Their newest and sixth album, Green and Gray, features all the hallmarks that have made them the best post-hardcore band of the decade: Kris Kuss’s unyielding drumming, odd time signatures, and a vocal unpredictability that can change from the introspective “Hair” to a squealing den of guitar violence on “The Soft Hands of Stephen Miller.” So what’s different about Green and Gray? Apart from a contentment in Maguire’s voice, not much. Throughout the record, he comes to accept his demons instead of fighting them off. “The door opens,” he repeats on “Hair,” as if seeing a sunset for the first time in a while.

Like it’s on antidepressants, Green and Gray is Pile’s most compressed album. Maguire has grown older. Shit, he even daydreams about politics these days with a mind that typically has too many of its own problems. Instead of mewling over sordid relationships like on 2017’s expansive and overlooked A Hairshirt of Purpose, he’s looking on the brightside on opener “Firewood,” where he can’t help but admit that “the shopping’s much easier now/I can be quiet and private and protected.” Although clearly reflecting on a breakup, he’s doing a fine job seeing the silver lining.

Still, you don’t crawl out of a five album run of self-deprecation, morbid humor, and contorted emotions without a few scars. The band’s 2012 album Dripping was recorded in a drunken stupor, far too concerned with drowning adolescent memories (“Baby Boy”) instead of facing them head on. By that point in the band’s career, they’d established themselves with instrumentals that never go where you think they’d go. Hairshirt took that even further, often diving into muted despair (“Milkshake”) before unleashing one of the most clear-eyed breakup songs in modern rock (“Dogs”).

This unpredictability is usually cadenced by Maguire’s guitar playing. Often in alternate tunings and in a mixture of major and atonal melodies, the rest of the band do a wonderful job keeping up. It’s quite clear that he’s self-taught. Six albums in, however, things are taking a sad turn toward predictability. “A Bug On Its Back” and “A Labyrinth With No Center” move in directions you can pick up on almost as soon as their riffs begin. Pile have frequented a dilapidated blues approach to rock before songs like “Bruxist Grin,” but the formula is either growing tired or simply not as rich. It’s difficult to decipher which because Pile have been an exceptional band for a such a long time.

The guitars resemble Wish You Were Here on “Hiding Places,” the albums most ambitious song and a break from Maguire’s more personal tales: “A cosmic prank on a world of suckers,” he shouts at a consumerist culture. The melody treats every note with an intensity, lending weight to each peak and valley. Although epic and meticulously written, the track feels perfunctory as an end-of-album statement. This isn’t because Maguire leans on Pink Floyd (his playing style will forever be his own), but because there’s an emotional blunting to the mood. The highs and lows would be much crisper under Pile’s usual spastic and punky production style. But a band, like a person, has to mature at some point if it’s to stay engaging. Did Pile do it too soon?

Green and Gray doesn’t leave out the traits that have turned Pile into heroes in their native Boston, but its maturity is playing a 2:1 ratio against them. This is a more palatable and approachable record (even if Maguire sounds like he’s being beaten to death on “The Soft Hands of Stephen Miller”). But what’s missing is a lot of risk, something that each Pile record has revelled in. Green and Gray is risky as well, but it’s ground down into a smaller, less-satisfying chunk of modern rock. Never heard Pile before? This is a great place to start. Huge fan already? Don’t hold your breath.

Album Review: Bibio - Ribbons

At this point, you know what you’re getting yourself into with Stephen Wilkinson. His work as Bibio has danced between 90’s house, lo-fi, breakbeat, and a litany of other tags across the length of single albums. This is a difficult thing to do well, but Bibio makes it work by maintaining a distinct recording style, the fidelity of which feels attainable, nostalgic, and rich - like a neighbor of yours has a home recording project that you’ve always admired. His music sounds like a secret, often accompanied by soft tape hiss, that has only ever been shared with a small handful of people.

Incidentally, there are millions of Bibio fans. 2009’s ambivalence avenue has achieved cult status despite the whispery softness of the production and the folktronica stew that details his songs. His latest, Ribbons, is still a distinctly Bibio-sounding record. Coming from someone with the ability to produce a solid club track like “fire ant,” this predictability is simultaneously disappointing and steadfast.

Still, Ribbons is his most complete record yet. Where older records lack concision in their genre, this album lacks it in the length. There are sixteen tracks, and Ribbons wears its weight too proudly. However, this is more of a freak folk album whereas all of his past work hasn’t been so defininable by a single tag. Wilkinson now has self-control under his belt.

Bibio plays freak folk with a grace and virtuosity we haven’t seen from him before. This guy can really shred on the guitar. The campfire classical of his playing is thoroughly flexed on “Watch The Flies,” complete with a bona fide solo section. Bibio rounds out his playing, also always acoustic in nature, with a litany of string instrument friends: “Ode to a Nuthatch” is a Pentangle-inspired guitar/mandolin dance, and “Patchouli May” provides a violin and Fender rhodes backdrop that could easily play in a backcountry Irish bar. Both of these tracks can easily make you forget how nice of a singing voice Bibio has underneath all his muscular guitar playing. The fact that he doesn’t oversaturate his records with it is an impressive exercise in self-restraint.

A lot of more recent freak folk greats use modern instrumentation to round out their sound, but Ribbons sounds like it could have been recorded at any time between the Britfolk revival 60s through the mid-00s freak folk craze. Still, Wilkinson carries his trusty keyboards and Toro y Moi-sounding electropop tags on two distinct tracks, “Before” and “Old Graffiti.” Like the rest of the record, these tracks could have been made in a Bibio song-generator, but stick the landing because they’re placed sparsely throughout a mostly instrumental record. Another departure and possibly Ribbons’s best track is “Pretty Ribbons and Lovely Flowers,” which is incidentally the bleakest piece on the album. The track plays with ghostly delayed vocals and overblown synths, but is still shot through Bibio’s restrained recording style. You’ll wish there more moments like it on the record.

The back half of tracks plays out like a rehashing of the first half more than an expansion on them, and Ribbons suffers from it. For a guy with so many talents up his sleeve, Bibio maintains a somewhat regimented and stiff sound. Still, the inviting nature of this record is well worth the time. It’s Wilkinson’s most picturesque and organic album, easily playing somewhere in the background on a summer day - perhaps coming from that neighbor of yours that’s secretly a classical guitar whiz.

Album Review: Avey Tare - Cows On Hourglass Pond

Send a member of Animal Collective on tour and you’re bound to get an album’s worth of new material out of it. They’re one of the finest bands to operate in that off-the-cuff, emotional level this side of The Grateful Dead. What places them so high on this list involves more than “jamming” on stage and recording the next session. The songwriting and form goes through a metamorphosis as well. With Avey Tare, one quarter of the band and its principal songwriter, this is exceptionally true. 

The songs on Cows on Hourglass Pond spent enough time in the 2017 Eucalyptus tour incubator and are surprisingly different despite being less than two years removed. Borrowing from each era of Tare’s solo work, the songs here are a grab bag of rich two-chord structures, slowed-down trance beats, samples, and a defeated, witful vocal. This last part, the vocal, is the biggest element separating the old Tare from the new. Some new musical tricks would have been a welcome addition.

‘Saturdays (Again)’ is a particularly sad outing. Tare skates on thin ice with an ocean of melancholy just below the surface. In the video for the single, he leads a cow across a psychedelic pasture as a metaphor for the emotional weight of his past. The songs best traits are its breezy quality and jazzy drums, simultaneously moving fast and slow. “My how time flies” mentions his younger cousin in the verse, and Tare can’t help but consider what it means to have someone younger than you comment on the chaotic passage of time.

Tare has always had an infatuation with the father time and how we try to maintain our childishness. “Do the elderly couples still kiss and hug?” he asked on Animal Collective’s 2005 disc Feels, but the excitement for growing older showcased there has been replaced with a middle-aged exhaustion throughout much of Hourglass Pond and ‘Saturdays (Again)’ in particular. ‘Chilly Blue’ is the perfect instrumental follow-up, and serves as a great way to forget the past and stop worrying about the future. Still, “Saturdays” lives partly in the present and partly in the past, all while trying to accept how Mondays aren’t very well suited for good times and fond memories.

Memory plays an enormous role throughout the record. ‘Eyes on Eyes’ meditates on eye contact and close relationships, both of which he longs for: “All the eyes I could’ve seen/and yours came beaming/I can’t look back/I’m changed in you.” This track is the most vocally buoyant and fun on the whole record. Trace your finger in the air to the melodies and your hand will do quite a dance. This playfulness is largely absent Hourglass Pond’s back half, where the mix of acoustic and sample-based music turns dull. ‘Our Little Chapter’ is a blatant underutilization of one of the most charismatic voices in indie rock. We know from Tare’s past records that he can turn sadness into bliss ( 2010’s Down There) and psychedelia into pure ecstacy (2007’s Strawberry Jam). The weaker moments here are right on the nose, and lack the emotional resonance we need from Tare.

‘What’s the Goodside?’ however perfectly strikes this balance between new and old Avey. Complex musings on aging (“Babies are for milking”) overlay minimal acoustic guitars and blend into a bath of downtempo bliss. Tare’s vocal is beautifully warped and twisted, adding a bleak piece of humanity to the tracks hypnotic meter.

Many of the elements that work on Hourglass Pond are present throughout the record, they just fail to make as deep an etching on the soul as other members of Tare’s enormous catalogue. Like his bandmate Panda Bear, whose new album Buoys has all the right ingredients, Tare juggles between using the production towards his advantage and half-baking the tunes. This is frustrating when considering how damn well a lot of the songs work here. ‘Taken Boy’ features the best songwriting on the album as Tare questions how people can live in a constant state of anticipation, but the vocal performance doesn’t have the bombast to match. ‘Nostalgia in Lemonade,’ on the other hand, has an exceptional delivery, but only feels half-finished in the wake of ‘Saturdays (Again).’.

Hourglass Pond is an off-balance album. If you played the album to someone who didn’t know Tare had a new album, it would be very unclear where it belongs in his discography. Eucalyptus was a folk record, and it operated well within that paradigm. Containing numerous elements from Tare’s career, Hourglass Pond has a bit of an identity crisis. Like recent years where Animal Collective have returned to acoustic instruments and the improvisation that helped give them their name, this record flashes a fine combination of experimental pop and folk, but it’s merely a flash. If these songs were all written on the stage during Avey’s last tour, maybe some of them need to get back up there for some more workshopping. As it were, Avey Tare is on tour, and we can find out for ourselves. I’d recommend that over diving too deep into the hourglass pond.

Album Review: Pond - Tasmania

Smooth synthesizers and drum machines creep through your eardrums like the first sip of water in the morning. “It’s spring and the cherry blossoms sprout,” coos Nick Allbrook at the onset of melody, and you get the feeling that the newest Pond record is going to be their best. Just then a glam boom-clap rhythm enters and Allbrook starts in with major swagger: “Jimmy grabs a beer and we wash our hands in the creek/talk is cheap!” It’s the kind of song you’d hear at a party - the people closest to the speakers can’t help but dance, and even those furthest away feel a radiating positivity.

This is ‘Daisy,’ the first track and single off Pond’s Tasmania, which is their most sure-handed set of recordings in ten years of consistent output. Sadly the track has only been available during the coldest months of the year where parties are few and far between. Regardless, ‘Daisy’ works wonders because of its ability to make you want to be surrounded by friends. If we’ve learned anything from James Murphy, it’s that longing and dancing are not mutually exclusive.

Pond do however lack one crucial ingredient to the enjoyment-as-a-reminder-of-your-friends formula: There aren’t enough hooks. It’s fun to sing along to ‘Daisy’ because many of the lyrics stick in your head. However, choruses like “Honey what’s wrong/I said babe what’s right?” off ‘The Boys Are Killing Me’ are too hamfisted to stick. The opposite problem occurs on ‘Burnt Out Star’ where Allbrook sings laboriously about the year 1917 for an overlong outro. The band is having a cathartic moment but the rest of us are left scratching our heads.

Much of Tasmania is still a lot of fun, but Pond manage to skip a host of intermediate descriptors and blur the line between fun and boring. This record is innovative in the sense that you’ve never heard Pond do it before, but dull because you’ve heard many of their contemporaries do it dozens of times. The retro sound they employ is well-established in modern music culture. Pond’s native Australia is already brimming with artists that know how to mix the old and the new. Alex Cameron’s vision of a cheesy 80s Los Angeles is so clear cut that you can’t take your ears off him, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have never had to try to be strange because Nuggets-era psychedelia already runs through their veins as well as their guitar amps. Pond are more like the last ten years of Americans The Flaming Lips - there’s a distinct precedent for being strange, but it seems like they’re embracing psychedelia on purpose.

Tasmania still has merit. ‘Sixteen Days’ is the ideal follow-up to ‘Daisy’ with rich waves of bass fuzz and delayed keystrokes, and the title track stands apart with a vocal performance that would make Prince turn his head. Still, the hooks feel literally and thematically absent. There are repeated phrases between ‘Tasmania’ and ‘Burnt Out Star,’ but multiple listens don’t get you any closer to one central idea, with the latter acting as more of an obligatory mid-album jam instead of a distinct statement.

‘Shame’ on the other hand captures a psych-electro sound that’s strange, catchy, and emotional all without trying. When the synths match Allbrook’s singing on the choruses, there’s a real poignancy in the prose: “I don’t wanna hate Marseille just because of this one day/so hurry up and rain/complete my day.” The following verse sees a teary-eyed Allbrook apologizing to someone with a sincerity that couldn’t possibly be faked.

Perhaps it’s the minimalistic production that makes ‘Shame’ stand out. Perhaps it’s the forced intensity on closer ‘Doctor’s In’ that makes it fall flat. Perhaps Kevin Parker’s steady production hand is too omnipresent. One thing that’s for sure however is that Pond continue to give things the old college try; and Tasmania is never grating or insulting. The problem is that they don’t go far enough in one particular artistic direction to make it more memorable than their last few records. The band still show the glimmer of potential they’ve always carried, and it’s nice to know that consistency is possible with the band. ‘Doctor’s In' ends with an abrupt fadeout, and your memory of Tasmania can depart at a similarly unsatisfying rate.