Recordings are often free and readily available in 2015, but that doesn't make it any easier to find the good stuff. A young band's stellar new record might be streaming for free on Bandcamp somewhere, but it's easily lost. Finding vital underground music often requires a resourceful middle person—usually, someone who goes to a lot of shows and owns an inordinate number of zines and tapes. It's to Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts' credit, for example, that bands like Beth Israel, Yuppies, and Eaters found an audience online. Each record on his label Dull Tools seems to challenge complacency and subvert expectations.
True to the label's reputation, the Brooklyn band Pill prove slippery to pin down on their debut EP. Post-punk is implied in Veronica Torres' deadpan vocals and Jon Campolo's echoing guitar clack, but Ben Jaffe's saxophone scrambles the signal. Sometimes, his melodies recall Steve Mackay's foundation work on "Fun House", and elsewhere, he detours into skronking freakouts à la Pharoah Sanders or Colin Stetson. There are circuit-bent electronics and blasts of noise, dour monotone vocals sung in unison and all-out screams. Across the EP's five tracks, which were produced by Andy Chugg of the art punks Pop. 1280, Pill keep listeners on their toes while navigating their own chaos.
While Jaffe's sax is a fascinating wild card, Torres' lyrics are the heart of this music. She targets seemingly innocuous moments in a relationship, peeling back the facade of domestic bliss and exposing ugly truths in shouted blurts. "Personality Flaw" depicts a couple who initially appeared compatible, but now are locked in a war of wills where nobody wants to compromise. "TV Wedding" explores how technology glosses over real-life despair. On "Hotline", Torres playacts the role of a "California blonde" in a one-sided conversation that's clearly predatory in nature. ("Oh, you wanna touch me where?/ Oh no, I'm younger than that!") The narratives are sometimes abstract and symbolic, but Torres' phrasing has a way of cutting through the haze. On "Psychic Nipple", after several lines alluding to entitlement, she delivers the devastating clincher "Privilege is a warm body that loves you."
This is where Pill showcase what they're capable of—they are loose with form, they pack in a lot of ideas, and they successfully deliver an emotionally complex narrative where joy is accompanied by an impossible-to-ignore undercurrent of danger. The band's debut outing is enigmatic—a Dull Tools record through and through—but it's also well crafted, full of stellar performances and unflinching lyrics. Not bad for a band's first recordings.
