Authenticity goes a long way these days in the music industry. It’s most desired in any aspiring musician and sets artists apart from a sea of others chomping at the bit. Using primarily programmed percussion only toughens the playing field; yet, when your band consists of two members playing the role of a full gang, approbation is appropriate.
Since the late-nineties, Pinback have developed a way of pulling in listeners on a more familiar, even personal level, that many acts struggle to achieve. For starters, the creative force between multi-instrumentalists Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV is something only these guys are capable of producing. In other words, despite the tired “indie rock” tag they’re often grouped; there’s no mistaking Pinback for another band.
After vanishing for a while, the duo snuck out a few new tracks in 2011, recruiting the eerie surrealist - illustrator Daniel Danger - to design the artwork to two EPs. This sampling was ladled straight from the very well of what has become Information Retrieved. Five years from their former 2007 release, Autumn of the Seraphs, the Pinback catalog ensues in a seasonally musical transference. Irrespectively lacking a wintry referenced title, Information Retrieved is a chilling, bracing entry.
Rob Crow notions this, not just sonically, but vocally in the track “Diminished”. Stanzas singing “Days confused/Ruined by a past you hardly knew/They frost in your eyes” are riddled with disconsolation. Later in the song, Crow croons, “Every Sunday you look out the window/To count the tracks in the snow/Till they get back”. Clearly, his vocabulary is cold; still it’s the lyrical solace freezing over the surface.
It’s this emotional, sometimes distressing expression that make Pinback so good at what they do, though not always leaving your head hanging. Second to last track, “Denslow, You Idiot!”, like its humorous title, is more fun and uplifting than drenched and heavy. A riveting verse wavers through hilly riffs, seemingly in odd time that buoyantly brightens the end of the album.
Like a long winter, there are slow moving times. Pinback are less about tricks and more about identity, so don’t expect much transformation in an initially vexatious song. If you like what these guys do, then it’s likely it will grow on you, or at least you’ll learn to get along. This brings to mind album closer “Sediment”; beginning only with an ostensible hip-hop beat and leading to a soapy, toned-down tune backed by keyed chords, it’s a tough match up against the excitement of “AFK” closing 2004’s Summer In Abaddon. However, top-notch craftsmanship (formerly found in the fretful urgency of “Glide”, the mysterious creep to climactic clamber of “Drawstring”, tight dexterity and immediate draw of the brilliant “His Phase”) reflects on the album as a whole.
At a mere 38 minutes, this collective of moments exists in a world designed like a story, with an exposition (“Proceed To Memory”), rising through “Glide” to “Sherman”, reaching its pinnacle (“His Phase”), and the falling action (“True North” – “Denslow!”) to “Sediment”, our denouement. It’s a daring adventure, a damn challenge at times, yet gripping, fulfilling and worthy of every inch on the shelf.
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