For a few years there, Pile seemed to be tired of being Pile. Who can blame them? Being Pile seems exhausting: playing like Shellac hopped up on caffeine, seeing out their 30s in sweaty punk clubs, having to think about Stephen Miller night after night.
After 2019’s heady, ambitious Green and Gray, the once prolific Boston DIY heroes took their time crafting a follow-up, instead dropping a collection of improvisational pieces and another of shakily recorded solo renditions of Pile songs. When a fully fledged album, All Fiction, finally arrived in 2023, it was uncharacteristically muted. Rick Maguire’s vocals sounded muffled and strange; synths and strings jostled for space in the mix. Had Pile embarked upon their post-rock era? Was this the new Pile, fans wondered, or just a temporary detour?
Well, maybe both. What’s impressive, even a bit confounding, about Pile’s ninth album, Sunshine and Balance Beams, is how well it traverses both paths, restoring the pummeling post-hardcore roar that fans have missed while integrating it with swooning strings and pockets of tenderness. This is undoubtedly a Pile album, with knotty, circuitous melodies that wind their way into thrashing finales, but it’s not really the same group that melted heads in Shea Stadium a decade ago. This Pile album opens with a swelling orchestral overture (“Balance Beams”) and carries a deeply mournful edge, though Maguire seems not so much to be mourning a literal death as the loss of some long-harbored dream for himself. “Death comes in all shapes,” he broods near the end of “Meanwhile Outside,” an eight-minute epic that lingers on its elegiac melodic motif with dirgelike finality. A harmonic accompaniment from backing vocalist Candace Clement underlines the somber weight of Maguire’s words.
Sunshine and Balance Beams retains much of the atypical instrumentation of All Fiction, but it’s employed in the service of fuller, more satisfying songs. “Bouncing in Blue” is a Pile all-timer, morphing from an unnervingly quiet duet between Maguire and icily layered synths to a cataclysmic climax, guitars and drums locked in a frightening communion with curdled horror-score strings. Drummer Kris Kuss, the band’s not-so-secret weapon, rises to the occasion with Bonham-esque intensity, but he’s equally adept using brushes instead of sticks on “Carrion Song,” a subtly fatalistic ballad that closes out the album with pillowy strings caressing Maguire’s visions of his own demise. “Let them feed on me/My offering in death” may seem like a gloomy note to end on, but it’s actually kind of upbeat compared to Maguire’s songs about the music industry and the psychic stress of eking out a creative career.
One of the eternal paradoxes of Pile is this: The better they get, the more chronically disillusioned they seem about the music industry and the elusive promise of material success. It’s understandable. Finding joy in music-making is one thing; making a career out of it is another, and, since at least 2019’s “My Employer,” Maguire has wrestled with that disconnect in his songwriting. This time around, we get “A Loosened Knot,” the angriest song here, a caustic math-rock outburst that recounts the indignity of “Reciting Satan’s prayer as a party trick to entertain them con-men/Curry favor, and gain trust,” only to wind up bested by “some grifter now grinning all dumb.”
Is all the work still worth it, Maguire seems to be asking, when the work gets you nowhere, the promised prizes just out of reach? In a promotional bio, Sadie Dupuis, of Speedy Ortiz fame, describes the album as “a Sisyphean fable concerned with labor and living.” The songs are filled with allegorical images of strenuous work, of treacherous paths through the wilderness, and a yearning for peace at the end of it all. “I built that house with only bones,” Maguire sings in “Bouncing in Blue”: “Shelters those dreams for which I’ve atoned.” The song’s narrator finds some peace in surrendering to the flood, letting go of the illusion of control. But no such resolution accompanies “Deep Clay,” a palpably frustrated rocker about the perils of letting productivity define your self-worth. “It is my belief/I can write my way out of whatever this place is!” Maguire screams at the climax, working to escape the trap set by a lifetime of creative work. In Pile’s world, as in most creative careers, redemption never arrives. You just keep struggling, and if you’re lucky, you funnel some of the psychic trauma into a few more songs. What else is there to do?
