"Shiver", the first song on Australian electro rock trio PVT's third album, begins with warm analog synth arpeggios and the vocals of frontman Richard Pike layered and detuned into a syrupy psychedelic sound that's barely human. As the song progresses, it accumulates parts that either support a melodic, even twee, pop side, or undercut it with a current of aggressive sonic weirdness. It's a fascinatingly unpredictable and completely enjoyable song. It also sounds remarkably like a collision between the Postal Service and the Knife, which could be a coincidence if the rest of the album wasn't littered with seemingly deliberate references to a diverse cast of musicians who've straddled the border between electronic dance music and pop.
PVT was formerly a more cerebral, less pop-oriented group that collaborated with Scott Herren in both Prefuse 73 and Savath y Savalas, and recorded with Tortoise's John McEntire. Their last record, 2010's Church With No Magic, whipsawed between dense, abrasive prog and ambient minimalism. While some of their past recordings have incorporated Pike's vocals, this is the first album where he sings on every track. His transition into the traditional frontman role is only one aspect of an extensive band overhaul that's made them substantially more accessible.
Like a lot of albums by artists who've ditched the constraints of "serious" music in order to indulge their taste for pop, Homosapien comes off as someone finally giving themselves permission to explore their basest pleasure points. This might explain the amount of homage going on, as well as the breadth of the influences they explore. Given the opportunity to make any kind of electronics-enhanced pop music they want, PVT seems to have tried to make all of them. Ironically, the most enjoyable songs on the album are the most challenging ones with the fewest references to familiar work. "Vertigo" builds from a skittering quasi-footwork beat into a lush, slowly shifting tangle of synth pads and polyrhythmic drumming. "Homosapien" has a weirdly lumbering beat and a lot of noise, with Pike's vocals processed in various ways past the point of intelligibility.
Homosapien's constant fluctuations between styles means it's a mercurial and somewhat uneven listen. After the warm introduction of "Shiver", the album suddenly turns icy and delivers two consecutive songs whose combination of cold-blooded roboticism and organic kinkiness shares a lot of similarities with Gary Numan and Marc Almond's early work. "Casual Success" has a postpunk edginess that's less derivative of the subgenre's innovators like Gang of Four than relatively recent revivalists like the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. The heavy INXS vibes emitted by "Love & Defeat" give a sense of how pop the group's willing to go. Their occasional reliance on pastiche earns itself a sort of pass, however: Compared to their past work, it's almost as if Homosapien is some new band's debut album, and first albums have a tendency to be derivative.
