Pinback
Autumn Of The Seraphs

The importance of being Rob Crow: part 2

Can one still manage, today, to be brilliant, inventive, incisive in pop music? The bearded and smiling face of Rob Crow, the perfect archetype of the successful nerd (as they used to say? "Born to lose...") gives us the ultimate, immediate, perpetual answer: yes. And, believe me: it's not a matter of overloading your style with hundreds of different instruments - a brush of ethnic, then classical reminiscences... darn, the rock shot anticipated by the twee chorus with the twang guitar, where is it? -, like emulating at all costs the masters of the past or, for lack of anything else, the industrious young craftsmen of our time. No, the key ingredient to add is considerably simpler: the ability, innate or not, to compose beautiful songs. To combine past, present, and future experiences into a single homogeneous mix, to throw your heart over the obstacle and try to rework the necessity of the verse/chorus/verse alternation according to a taste and order not subject to external grandiosity. Finally, to create, with few elements at your disposal, an extraordinary universe of notes, characters, sensations. Does it all seem very vague and difficult? Keep reading.

I was saying, Rob Crow. I've always followed Pinback, his main creation, active since the second half of the '90s (there are others, of course ...but let's not digress). In my opinion, too many labels have been used to try to encapsulate their music: alternative pop, math-pop, post-pop, indie rock (!). In vain. Firstly, point one: they seem suspended in an ideal dimension between the Sixties and the Nineties, made of sweet pop music boxes and of driving guitars and simple, yet very elegant arrangements. Still: they record (recorded?) for Touch & Go. Some might consider it a detail of little, if any, importance. In fact, the label's aesthetic wonderfully reflects in their tracks, always rich with an underlying nervousness - which we could call, if we will, also dynamism - and capable of reflecting various elements of early post-punk, such as rhythms often broken into short, sharp, crackling breaks. All sweetened, mind you (but maybe not). Lastly: forget about choruses, pastoral polaroids a cappella - and elevated deterioration - back in vogue with the Fleet Foxes' successes, sugar pouring by the tons on the composition method, leading it to ruin. Here, the material follows a much drier, defined, precise line. More rock. Thought out and idealized.

Without neglecting the need to procure, at all costs, at least one chapter of their beautiful discography (I would suggest "Summer In Abaddon", from 2004, with a gem like "Fortress"), let's focus our attention on the last - hopefully for a short time - "Autumn Of The Seraphs", from almost two years ago. Eleven sparse tracks for a power trio (keyboards occasionally pop up too, but it's sheer ornament) forming one of the key albums of the year. If you had to forcibly reduce it to a word, the best choice would fall on "circular". Enveloping melodies, beautiful crescendos, guitars that inlay one riff inside another, without attacking or sweetening the listener's ears. "From Nothing To Nowhere" is the first symptom, and not even the best, of this sort of Eden: a fast six-string that scratches but doesn't wound, a series of beautiful vocal interlocks and an enviable instrumental conduct, enclosed in an absolutely drinkable duration. Even better is the following "Barnes", which digs grooves with a very prominent bass and soothes pain with a tempo halfway between a ballad and the typical Fugazi pull. Completing the trio, the clusters of musicality of "Good To Sea", halfway between the Beatles and Slint. Everything miraculously comes back and yet, it will seem strange, banality is precisely the ingredient that, for one reason or another, cannot find its place: immediately memorable refrains, words and syllables playing at completion, but each time the exercise appears new and you don't have time to get bored.

After such a convincing start, one might fear a sharp drop in tension in the subsequent episodes. Instead, the record takes more and more shape and continues, while remaining sober, to split, hybridize with various genres, distinguish itself for effectiveness, return to itself without having unraveled. "How We Breathe" is an introspective dive for voice, guitar, piano, and drum machine, like Radiohead's "Kid A" shattered in slow-core: "Subbing For Eden" dresses in brit, but with its mind on "Fortress"; "Devil You Know" unfolds almost at a blues rhythm, with a frankly irresistible refrain. These would also be sufficient credentials to deserve much more attention than this type of work usually gets, but Pinback goes further, with "Bouquet" which is a territory for dissonances - and, in general, where they allow themselves a bit of everything -, a classical rock ballad like "Off By 50" (which, I don't know how to explain to you, lives in a totally different way from its amorphous sisters) and a varied single like "Blue Harvest".

If you continue to ignore them, your sin will become mortal.

Because, let's face it: how can you not like Rob Crow?

_{This review is dedicated to Malaika}