Like their name implies, Pit Er Pat are easy to miss if you're not looking for them. They make groove-based music, but those grooves are patient, at times exceedingly subtle. They're indie, but of the diffident sort that pairs Fay Davis-Jeffers' dispassionate, nearly naïve-sounding vocals with bony, bookish rhythms. It's not that they have anything to be embarassed about: The record sees them incorporating, largely successfully, all manner of exotic-sounding, museum-quality instrumentation into their repertoire, and doing it the only way they know how-- quietly. In terms of their Chicago predecessors and contemporaries, the new Pit Er Pat approximates Tortoise's rhythm-centered experiments while mostly avoiding their overthinking tendencies, suggests the deceptively complicated melodic structures of tourmates Fiery Furnaces, and at points echoes Mahjongg's frenzied, rhythmic whirl.
Mostly, though, Pit Er Pat are fine with quiet tinkering, and much of High Time reflects the playful experimental legacy of dub reggae; most obviously on "Evacuation Days", in the way the reedy guitar weaves in and out of the bottomless bass, dodging random sound effects (like a Brazilian cuíca, most recognizable from Beck's "Tropicalia") like renegade cab drivers. Or that maniacal laugh on "Copper Pennies"-- sped up and tweaked so that it resembles a speed-addled chimp-- that matches the song's eerie funk, redolent of the pungent, gloomy Euro-fusion Can perfected on Ege Bamyasi and Tago Mago. "Trod-A-Long" pulls the band as far out of its shell as it's ever been, with playful organ licks, drawn out horn lines, melodica-derived ambience, and laser sound effects coalescing into a piece that suggests it should have its own dance to accompany it.
The hieroglyphically-titled opening track "☉ In ♑ : ☽ in ♈ : Anno IVxx" asserts that High Time's occasional bouts of playfulness are still cloaked in mystery. "Anno"'s vocal consists of nothing but chanted numbers, as if the song held an embedded code to decipher. Well, I've deciphered it, and it turns out that "IV" means "4", and "xx" means "20", and the URL is already taken, bros. Pit er Pat may be telling us they're stoners (that would explain the dub), but a track like "Omen" suggests that they're not the Brightblack Morning Light, hippie variety. As melancholy brass rises and falls like foghorns signaling a funeral at sea, Davis-Jeffers intimates that the album's title isn't suggesting the magazine that celebrates sticky hydro, but the ultimate buzzkill. "Push me, push me under, where the cold river flows" tells us it's "high time" for either an underwater burial or the creepiest-ever baptism. Despite the band's significant steps forward, High Time isn't a complete rebirth for Pit Er Pat, but the record shows that in their own way, they can learn and perform a more extroverted language.
