Pontiak
Dialectic of Ignorance

The three Jennings brothers, Van and Lain Carney, have descended the mountains and from Blue Ridge Mountain, Virginia, United States, have returned to the valley with in their hands a new album (recorded at their own A studio) which is clearly a bomb and an unmissable work for fans of psychedelia and acid and stoner sounds.

'Dialectic Of Ignorance' is the latest and anticipated LP by Pontiak released last March 24 via Thrill Jockey Records. It's a particularly awaited record since the band's last LP 'Innocence' was practically released three years ago back in 2014. But it seems that the Carney brothers have been busy down there in Virginia where they've worked on the inauguration of their brewery, opened in August 2015.

The break apparently served the three brothers to re-elaborate their creative process. Van Carney wanted to emphasize a certain parallelism between beer production and music, defining them both as creative processes with lots of immediate possibilities. In truth, aside from this, managing the brewery, while on one hand extended the process of realizing the new album, on the other gave them the chance to muse longer on each piece: every morning, in fact, while working at the brewery, they re-listened to the previous day's recordings and contemplated what adjustments to make.

This is the genesis of 'Dialectic Of Ignorance', which is probably a record different from all previously released by Pontiak. Compared to the past, I would say this one is more a record of 'true' songs (eight in total), but which naturally do not lack the typical features of their sound, typically recognizable for the power of the bass and drums sound and the hypnotic obsessions of the guitar riffs.

Clearly, this time around, there are those that can be defined as veritable acid trips and long heavy-psych sessions ('Youth And Age', 'Dirtbags'...) or more 'monolithic' pieces like 'Ignorance Makes Me High'), but all in this case, instead of constituting a space-time continuum of powerful hallucinatory reverberations for their own sake, fit into the context of the individual songs of the album. Compared to the past, there is also the search for different solutions in a certain acidity of the guitar that evokes psychedelic episodes of the seventies like 'Tomorrow Is Forgetting', 'Hidden Prettiness', 'We've Fucked This Up'.

In any case, it is a record with which the three Carney brothers once again decide to send a message. Written in a particular historical phase of their country and under the influence of readings by writers such as Bohumil Hrabal and Leo Tolstoy, 'Dialect of Ignorance' does not want to be exactly a 'political' album but a sort of message, and this in a nutshell would be that the important thing is to be there, to stay in the moment. Even if everything seems to have gone to hell, maybe you can always do something important for yourself and others. A kind of shake-up we all sometimes need.