Pit Er Pat | Pyramids (Thrill Jockey)
Pit Er Pat | Pyramids
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The band has suggested that the recurrence of pyramid imagery in their lives–in the art they make, in their “personal encounters,” even in their three-piece lineup–inspired the album. But dreams seem to play an equally important role. The opening track, “Brain Monster,” is an off-kilter lullaby with a sparse keyboard melody that sounds like an amplified music box, and Davis-Jeffers’s crystalline, casually elegiac vocals call up the ambiguous underworld of the unconscious: “So scared to go to sleep, afraid of what I might dream,” she murmurs, as electronic glitches flitter in the background. Then a shimmering crash of cymbals introduces “Seasick (Hang Ten),” the highlight of the album, and right away the mood shifts. Doran strums acoustic guitar and takes the lead vocal, singing in a crackled tone about sunset-colored silks and shifting sea storms.
From there the record opens up in all kinds of directions, making room for atmospheric samples of rain forests and sirens in unusual arrangements that depart from verse-chorus structure or use dizzying amounts of space. Two things hold it all together, despite the constant shifts in color and direction: Fuego’s eccentric and imaginative drumming, which sometimes seems to communicate as vividly as Davis-Jeffers’s lyrics, and the thread of fragile intimacy that runs through every song. Pyramids was recorded last winter, while the city slipped beneath a sheet of sleet, and like a January landscape it conceals its secrets, giving them up only with time. –Mia Lily Clarke
Look into the discography of any one of the principal players on Amplified and the odds are good you’ll turn up a few of the others–throughout the scene documented on the disc there was an inspiring level of flexibility and give-and-take. Hindsight makes it even clearer how rare that was: Philip Johnston, for instance, sticks pretty much to straight jazz these days, and trombonist Jim Staley, who also played in Sharp’s group, favors nonidiomatic free improv. They haven’t exactly grown hidebound, but neither has preserved the freewheeling spirit of cross-genre collaboration that was the norm at the Kitchen.
