aaamusic | On 25, Mar 2012

So what we have is a band with a vaguely Engrish name and an exclamation mark in the album title. But what is this that my rock n roll beleaguered ears are hearing? Admitting to not doing my research beforehand and having a week of consecutive gigs that resembled the New Heavy Sounds division of Artrocker smacking me into next year with a plank of wood, I went on judging a book by its cover and cringed my way into what is actually a 45-minute slice of mesmeric, occasionally patchy but overall rewarding post rock. Pinkunoizu’s ‘Free Time!’ is one of those albums you’ll want to shelve between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and iLiKETRAiNS. It’s got the understated orchestral strangeness of the former, and the slightly more rock/electro flavours of the latter.

To go through a track-by-track analysis would possibly defeat the point of this album, as there doesn’t seem to be a strict sense of “this is a song, now this one” as tracks will be divided into several sections, like ‘The Abyss’, which somehow manages to wander from starting out as a gloomy iLiKETRAiNS style number with sparse guitars and synths unfolding over a hushed drumbeat and a whisper-soft baritone voice lurking in the background drenched in reverb, into a strange new age pool of sighing synths, into an emotive spectral vocal duet, into a strangely compelling blues-overdrive guitar melody. ‘Time Is Like A Melody’ likewise moves from dark, skewed folk to a hypnotic repetitive xylophone and chorus… thing, like Tu Fawning written by Fleet Foxes. Then you’re led straight into the strange world of ‘Myriad Pyramid’, which is the seductive lovechild of spaghetti western soundtracks, electro, and the guitar riff from ‘How Soon Is Now?’, a deliciously unfathomable mix that shimmers its way past augmented minors and clattering percussion grooves to a haze of shoegaze-y feedback.

There are moments of disturbance, like the cartoony jazz pop of ‘Parabolic Delusions’, where the bouncy melody and intrusive rhythm loop doesn’t quite fit the overall monochrome introversion, despite the intriguing melodies afoot in the instruments.

The Tu Fawning comparisons drift back in the fascinating musical Rubik’s cube that is ‘Death Is Not A Lover’, which swirls the spectres of a million Morricone soundtracks into the patchouli-scented mists of time, with the result being an unearthly ten-minute patchwork that scatters the listener between modern indie’s fascination with Afrobeat, an incense-burning new age bookshop complete with meditative chants and shimmering east Asian instruments, and the burnt-out ashes of western rock and techno and even some breathy soul pop.

Closing track ‘Somber Ground’ takes a breath, and appears almost as the stand-alone compared to the previous tracks’ flow. The Godspeed You! Black Emperor comparisons come back in the orchestral bleakness of it all, even if there is a slightly more obvious and lyrical vocal track. This eventually morphs into the more laid-back and introspective little cousin of The Mars Volta, in terms of lunatic prog-jazz wind instruments and tangled polyphonic weirdness, but in a way that retains a hint of wistful 60s pop in the vocal duet, and one that doesn’t feel quite as relentlessly insane as The Mars Volta.

 

‘Free Time!’ is on the one hand a gently compelling set of tracks, put together with care, attention, artistry, and an obvious sense of thinking outside the box. This occasionally yields some good results, but it also creates an album that despite its pseudo-symphonic flow feels oddly disjointed and try-hard at times. It’s a little too… “pop” for a full GY!BE experience, too relaxed for a Mars Volta, and way too weird for a “normal” listen. That said, although ‘Free Time!’ won’t be kitting out the real long dark night of the soul moments, it’s ideal for those moments where you feel totally burnt out and defeated by much-beloved heavy riffs. Pinkunoizu are there to restore your sense of what lurks beyond, and even if they get lost occasionally, it’s a mysterious and haunting world they send through the airwaves.

 

Katie H-Halinski