Album Review: Pacifica - In Your Face!

The story of the band Pacifica- the music duo, not the city in California, or the mean girl from Gravity Falls- is all about the global reach of New York City, but actually, but really, to get what's going on here, you have to make a layover in the UK. Pacifica, an Argentine band that sings primarily in English, has the kind of vibe that drives rock fans on the island downright mental- cool, detached, hook-heavy, glossy and polished, with cut-edit ready grooves seemingly tailored for high-end perfume ads as much as montages of modish youth raving in a warehouse basement. With a little Arctic Monkeys' DNA percolating up from the group's evolutionary past and a general adherence to the playful pop-bite that dragged groups like The Kooks into the center spotlight for a brief moment in the '00s, paired with promo images of the duo running around urban byways in brightly coloured tracksuits and indie-sleaze-inspired dress-down formal wear, it's enough to get them plastered all over what remains of the rainy island's music press and compel tender but insular youth to track down every bit of biographical info there is to be found on the duo, down to scans of their dental records (it probably doesn't hurt that lead vocalist Inés embodies a spit-take-inducing image of a young Mick Jagger on the original cover of their LP... likely one of the reasons they've swapped it on Bandcamp and elsewhere). They're sort of what limeys wish us yanks were like, rather than the harsh reality of slovenly decline and blind obstinacy that actually defines our national character. From the prickly, playful gnaw and sugar-coated strokes of melodic rebound and skating roll of "What You Doing," to the high-heel-clacking club beat and post-punk zoot-up of "Indie Boyz," to the fog-clearing, reflective ambiance cohering in a condensation of revelation and rebuke on the title track, In Your Face! is the cross-cultural pop phenomenon that you can more or less take anywhere and enjoy anytime- the type of simulated global sweep that networks the world through sound and transcends the strife that actually stains the quotidian of the teeming masses who congregate in every corner of the globe. If the US is going to have a de facto ambassador to the old world and beyond, I can think of worse candidates than these two ladies, content to skip their way across the pond, panhandle, and plateau, and proliferate a generally positive resonance throughout the world as representatives of the best that the Americas have to offer, as opposed to what the country typically displays as its cultural and societal output, which, when not exported in the form of literal and unilateral annihilation, has become akin to so much discarded plastic dumped directly into the ocean. If folks in the UK and elsewhere come to view stylish, smart, and sincere actors like Pacifica as the worthy inheritors of the aspirations of the cross-continental, Atlantic seaboard on this half of our blue pearl, I'm happy to deputize them as such. There are certainly worse types of Americans you could have in your face than Pacifica. 

Album Review: Dreadnought - The Endless

Big fan of the cover art for this one. Even bigger fan of the fact that the music matches the cover in its majesty and complexity. The Endless is the fifth studio LP from Colorado doom metal and post-metal unlikely upstarts, Dreadnought. Their sound is akin to a cross between Pelican, Isis, and Procol Harum, with periodic black metal vocals, drawing not-too-surprising influence from groups like King Crimson, Opeth, and Moonsorrow. The Endless is an exploration of, conversation with, and at times flight from, man's essential duality- a creator and destroyer, a divinely endowed creature burdened by its freedoms, crying out for deliverance only to find the chains of vice grow ever tighter with the resonance of his wail, knowing only emancipation through submission in a cowering shade, ceasing his struggle so that the occasion never again arises for him to curse the bite of the irons that weigh him down. Either the body depresses and encumbers the soul, or the soul repudiates the body- whichever is the more acceptable death determines the winding path you take in life to get there, and with every step a little drizzle of the psyche eeks out between your toenails; whether it boils like tar returning to the Earth, or soars like a dove once it escapes the shelf of your little spurs, is a fair indicator of where the rest will follow. A splendidly moving and disturbing premonition of fate and the consequences of habituation, as ensnaring, troubling, and poetically melancholic as the dark churn of juxtapositions that fires the cauldron of Dreadnought's auditory dispensation of the braided, interminable whorl of salvation and despair, in whose eye lies the human heart, bleeding and pleading with spite.

Southbound and down, aren't we all... (Profound Lore).