Pontiak – Living (Music Review)
By Andrew Duncan • May 7th, 2010 • Category: Categories, Reviews, RockPontiak
Living
Thrill Jockey
Rating: 4.6 out of 5
Links:
Pontiak: http://www.pontiak.net/
Thrill Jockey: http://www.thrilljockey.com/
Can we not simply enjoy an album for the simple idea that it’s just cool to listen to? Pontiak’s Living is dang cool. If there is a deep, philosophical meaning buried in the music, I don’t care. The only deep philosophy I want to have preached to me is the heavy groove-laden guitars and chunky bass lines that gyrate beyond gyration.
Their fifth release in two years, Living contrasts from their previous releases in the fact that they did not spitfire record this album like Sea Voids. But the brothers Van, Lain, and Jennings Carney still keep their montage of musical roughness at bay. Even though more time was spent on Living, it was recorded using reel to reel and laid down on 2-track tape.
So when you hear the chugging of the guitars and the hypnotic stoner rock instrumentals, you are hearing this band in its natural state, both the filth and the fury of rock and roll, chugging along like a dusty steam train.
Instead of diving into a catatonic state of epic-length exploratory rock songs, Pontiak blooms from the epicormic state of rock and roll by utilizing the timing ideology of the three-minute pop song construction.
While the songs are not hurried, moving the album along in quick pace only works to help Living be instantaneous. Before you blink twice, you are halfway down the song list.
With the short attention span, you cannot really call Living krautrock, but you can take the climactic points of krautrock and throw it into Living. There is not build up on this album, Pontiak goes straight for the gut.
“Young” sounds like a warm-up session for Frank Zappa during his Apostrophe days, while “Second Sun” takes notes off of Amon Duul II. Then there is “This Is Living,” which sounds like the band just came off of a daze of listening to Deep Purple’s Machine Head all night.
As rock cliche as it sounds, Living is all killer and no filler, and for a rock album that can jam its socks off, it does not get much better than this.
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Andrew Duncan is a journalist who has migrated to the forces of academia. He has written for various publications including Chord, Heckler, Readyset...Aesthetic, and a vast array of alternative press contributions. When not roaming the streets of Indianapolis, he is either addicted to KXCI, making music, or striving to watch every film listed on IMDB.
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[...] ZapTown : Instead of diving into a catatonic state of epic-length exploratory rock songs, Pontiak blooms from the epicormic state of rock and roll by utilizing the timing ideology of the three-minute pop song construction. … “Young” sounds like a warm-up session for Frank Zappa during his Apostrophe days, while “Second Sun” takes notes off of Amon Duul II. Then there is “This Is Living,” which sounds like the band just came off of a daze of listening to Deep Purple’s Machine Head all night.” [...]