Saturday, June 23, 2012

Pinkish Black- S/T


The doctor is here my drugs are in. No not the ones my lack of healthcare can't provide but the ones my soul needs, they arrived in the form of the 7 songs on Pinkish Black's  self-titled 2012 release. This album floats like the ghost of a drug induced suicide yet has the density of a black hole. It's not heavy in the metal sense but in an oppressive sonic sense. This two piece out of Fort Worth Texas have their  metal influences undercoating the drive of the drums and grind of the often distorted bass which churn together on the same post-apocalyptic steam engine which Godflesh rode in on years ago.
  The album opens with a throb...song name rides the pulse until the wave crashes into a eerie shimmer of the second track "Everything went dark " it soars short and sweetly with a melancholy dripping from the crooned vocals.
  If Ridley Scott doesn't use the song "Passerby" in this next Blade Runner venture he's scheming, he would be missing the boat. Though the song feels more grimey like William Gibson than Phillip K Dick, the bleak layering ads to the robotic coldness. The death-rock label is often used to describe this band and I feel it's a little of a misnomer as it looks back with a sense of nostalgia to the 80's and I feel this is very forward thinking music, the only 80's band that really strikes me here is Kraftwerk.
The mix is very strong even in the lo-fi approach to distortion on the bass which dominates the track "Fall down". The Swans influence peeks of  the murk, but in the sense of Micheal Gira driving a bulldozer through the set of Eraser Head. I keep referencing movies here because their is something very cinematic about the vastness of the sound .
The bomb which created the waste land, drops at the onset of "Tell her I'm Dead".  The spectral vocals at this point in the album build into a scream, the tempo shifts into echoes of what I suppose is a blast beat of sorts collapsing  a falsetto which brings to mind what Jeff Buckley must have sounded like as he drowned.
The sparse piano of "Tastes like blood" is crushed by the bass on drums dropped on it , as they hammer it's splinters into the ground when the first riff I might consider doom surfaces. The vocals here also crawl out of the hold  Nick Cave was hiding in when he croaked "release the bats" back in the days of the Birthday Party.
The closer "Against the Door" is the album most straight forward piece with the drums driving and the pyschedelics whirling around it, the interplay of  bass and drums here brings to mind Motorhead if they didn't kick the rock n roll 3's and 4's. This song along with "Tell her I'm dead" I had to give a few listens for it to click as  they contain elments which are not as easilly blended with the rest of the album though made more sense to me with repetition . After a few spins of  "Against the door" I began to recognize the hypnotic pounding was a similar approach to same kind of drone Urfaust invokes, just with more theramin bells and whistles following it down the rabbit hole, where Urfaust is goose stepping into a Wagnerian dystopia.
So this looks to be the closest to perfect an album has come in 2012 and in my book is the album to beat for album of the year,  I have been streaming it on their band camp until the money ship arrives so i can purchase it on my very own as I  forsee this being an indepesible soundtrack for low swings to come and will go ahead an award it the vey elusive score of 10 out 10
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