Song lyrics tend to be inextricable from the songs they accompany, for obvious reasons. Often, this is best for everyone, as they may not stand up to poetic scrutiny on their own, but it’s widely accepted that all sorts of doggerel can come alive given suitable musical pairing. Different genres have therefore established stock lyrical modes, with a view to pleasing the crowd you’d suppose, which makes it all the more notable when a record seems to wilfully go against this, such as the new album by Pyrrhon from New York.
Active for a decade and a half or so, Pyrrhon’s four albums prior to Exhaust were death metal-approximate if not for genre purists, with the influence of prog, jazz and noise rock variously apparent. They still are on this latest album, arguably more so than death metal in fact, but the results remain scathing and abrasive, with vocalist Doug Moore switching between a depth-of-the-valley growl and a banshee-like screech across these ten songs. This makes reading some of their lyrics, which are available on the Bandcamp page linked above, a dissonant experience.
‘Concrete Charlie’ takes its title from the nickname of Chuck Bednarik, an infamous hardman of the mid-century NFL, and addresses his probable brain injury-related decline. It talks, in bittersweet terms, of faded glory and a changed game. If you showed its six verses to people and asked them to suggest an appropriate type of backing music, I fancy they might suggest something in the Springsteen mould, or maybe some literary indie like the Mountain Goats if their tastes swung that way. I doubt anyone would tell you it ought to be performed in a manner cycling between grindcore, tech-death and math-metal, which is what Pyrrhon have done.
There are other standout examples of this jarring approach. ‘Luck Of The Draw’ describes the proverbial no-hoper at a casino – an actual gambling establishment or the casino of life, either works – and, on paper, is as country-flavoured as the music isn’t. Musically, it’s not a mile from The Dillinger Escape Plan circa Calculating Infinity, which to put it in context is about as mainstream-sounding as Pyrrhon get. On album closer ‘Hell Medicine’, Moore’s presumably unearnest paean to heavy drinking has the air of a cruder Tom Waits, though this may be obscured by Erik Malave’s galloping bass and Dylan DiLella’s tendency to redeploy pinch harmonics in the repetitive manner of Glenn Branca (also heard on track one, ‘Not Going To Mars’, which offers some nice circularity).
Evidently accomplished musicians with catholic tastes, Exhaust casts Pyrrhon’s net wider than before without threatening to shed their identity. I taste brutal prog when pummelled by ‘The Greatest City On Earth’ (about various means of getting around New York, a topic you might have to live in New York to find interesting); free jazz in Steve Schwegler’s drums on ‘Out Of Gas’; late 90s emo violence during ‘First As Tragedy, Then As Farce’, notwithstanding DiLella busting out a guitar solo positioned at the midpoint between Trey Azagthoth and Duane Denison. If that noisenik equation sounds like catnip to you, expect to get at least some satisfaction from this distinctive, distinguished album of high grade avant garde extreme metal.
