PVA are riotous Londoners, a trio comprised of Ella Harris, Josh Baxter and Louis Satchell, whose experimental electronica has taken (half) a chill pill for album two, No More Like This. Known for their exhilarating sweat-drenched live sets, their sound engages the somatic. It’s a meeting of jagged danceable electronics, fleshy drones and sultry emotive vocals. The album oscillates between synth pop and club-ready beats with delectable impulsivity.
No More Like This is a rippled watery reflection of PVA’s work so far – familiar yet distorted. Their prior releases, such as their (2020) EP Toner are echoed in the group’s continued musical exploration of queerness and the body. No More Like This is intelligent but not chin-stroke music. It’s for the dance floor – and the after-party.
Opener ‘Rain’ is uncanny. Harris’s repeated “Good morning”, slightly compressed, is like a psychedelic alarm clock taken from the future. Vocals are isolated for the first time for PVA, a new motif in this album that later (most notably on ‘Flood’, track 8) becomes choral. Harris’s vocalisation is grounding as the beats turn up. Unlimited by time period or category, what unifies PVA’s choices is their sensuality. Time travelling, the band magpie visceral metallic clanks from industrial music to pair with resounding horns for instrumentation. Guttural clanks meet grand sonics. There is no hierarchy.
Track two, ‘Enough’ drums out PVA’s familiar club beat, decisive and paired with equally directive commanding vocals. It was the second single released from the album, and it’s a showstopper. Woozy synths layer up a sticky atmosphere that adds to the breathless pants littered on the album. Like a stolen conversation late at night in the smoking area, or fleeting connections in a warehouse, ‘Enough’ is hot and claustrophobic in the best way. PVA’s drones are full bodied, their scratchy strings and cymbals in tension only add to the other’s comparative warmth. This multifaceted union is what is so loveable about PVA.
Explicit experiments with gendered categories appear on ‘Boyface’, like their ‘Sleek Form’, to perhaps touch on the eventually arbitrary distinctions of man/woman/other. ‘Sleek Form’ says, “Met a man today, He’s a woman no more” whilst the mention of gender on ‘Boyface’ (“You’ve got a boy’s face and soft lips”) is accompanied by a music video featuring queer folks across the gender spectrum. The tune itself squelches around, unashamedly sexy. Like the perfect sonic tensions held across PVA’s oeuvre, supposed contradiction gives way to a new sort of truth, one that can define itself singularly.
Part of their consistency comes from on-going self-sampling that the band have used since the start. Stems crop up from past songs in this new album, including the choral end to ‘Rain’ that’s a stack of all three band members’ voices from a different song they made years ago. Deftly plied out of the stereo file, the only version they had left, the splintered stem has a ghostly texture. Other elements are drawn out of the album demo file they started three years ago, that included mashed up synths from ‘Exhaust / Surroundings’ (track 3 on Toner), that I seem to hear everywhere in PVA’s work. No More Like This sees the familiar and unfamiliar shake hands, like a hallucinatory introduction between friends.
