Pontiak
Maker

"The Pleasure of Waiting"

Even though by nature I do not love waiting, I conversely adore the state of frenzied anticipation for something I desire, be it a person or a thing. That's why, after at least 5 years of relentless downloading, I realized that something inside was dying. This aforementioned pleasure of waiting, an integral part of my relationship with music ever since. Yes, because for a while I thought (and still do) that downloading was an excellent way to promote one's music (for musicians) and to sift the junk from the valuable stuff (for listeners). However, I underestimated the fact that a record is not just the music it contains, at least not for me. This doesn't mean that a beautiful artwork can make us forget the qualitatively lousy music it contains, but if the visual and musical impact match, the combination that arises enhances the presence of both.

The dematerialization of the music medium has indeed endowed music with practicality, lightness, and potential ubiquity, but in the long run, it's cooling our relationship with it. Soon, records will be only digital, and the idea of the artwork-music connection will go by the wayside, just like the very notion of "album", considering that the limitations of available space on a medium (whether vinyl or CD) are now a memory. And it's precisely when I tried to interpret this trend in future perspective that I became afraid of losing all the extra-auditory sensations that bind me to music. And I started buying less, often from the few remaining record stores, preferably on vinyl. And listening less, and thus better, to what I download.

Perhaps it was this awareness, but as if by magic, I found myself with a few nice records in hand over these two or three months. Which makes me think that I was wrong in saying that little beautiful music has emerged in recent years. Simply almost no one manages to give the right time to a record anymore, and, at least for the listens I prefer, time is fundamental. One of the records that literally changed after purchase and a careful listen, but without haste, is precisely the second output by the bearded Pontiak, already reviewed last year with their excellent debut.

"Maker" tries to move away from the psych post-blues territories and similar stuff of the previous one, to take a more disjointed, almost post-punk direction in certain brief instrumental nods ("Headless Conference"), while maintaining a hypnotic obsessive pace worth noting (exemplified by the Sabbath-like sedated rhythm of the opening "Laywayed"). The key lies in the many short tracks, often just sketched or abruptly interrupted ("Wild Knife Night Flight" deserved at least 30 more seconds!), which frame two long pieces: the 5-plus minutes of "Wax Worship", intro to late-period Fugazi and hyper-stunning blues continuation, and the 13 minutes of the title track, a magmatic whirlpool between early Sleep and Dead Meadow. To enrich it all, two atypical ballads, "Aestival" and "Seminal Shining", that break the climate between the bucolic and the paranoid that pervades the album.

As proof of what was said above, perhaps even at Thrill Jockey, they had the same grim predictions for the fate of the music medium, considering that the packaging is a miniature replica of a vinyl (not one of the vinyl-like reissues of old records) complete with a plastic record sleeve. In short, for once form and substance.