Though The Flexible Entertainer marks some big changes for the group, Pit Er Pat are used to reinvention by now. They began as a backing crew for a singer-songwriter who since left the band, and now have pared down from three members to two since the release of their previous album, High Time. Before their last European tour as a duo, they started writing songs for just sampler, guitar, and voice-- in part to keep the energy level up throughout the set, and partly to travel light. This practically grounded aesthetic choice led to the songs on their dance- and R&B-borrowing new album, which is likely the band's boldest step forward of their career.
Having previously fed on a diet of everything post-punk, the band's now opening up to rhythms and sounds from modern R&B. "Water", with no guitar or live drums to speak of, opens the record on the most conspicuous shift, as singer Fay Davis-Jeffers tries out more direct, suggestive couplets, one a beat that nods to Timbaland's late-1990s heyday. That said, there's no mistaking it's them: The vocals of Davis-Jeffers are still somewhere between coy and detached, and on the following track, "Nightroom", the clean, minimal guitar that dominated the band's previous albums makes itself heard.
These are compelling parts, but rarely do the songs add up to more than their sum. There's a promising middle ground on tracks like "Godspot", where reverberating keys add hair-raising tension while guitar and keyboards duel around the main melody line. Some of Pit Er Pat's most pronounced rhythms are found on the faux-drum-circle workout "Summer Rose" and the extended runtime of "Emperor of Charms"-- the closest they come here to breaking a sweat. But it's on the final track, "Specimen", where they take these elements somewhere more unexpected. Everything gets slowed to a menacing crawl, deep bass hits, the guitar buried under reverb, judicious echo on the drums, and a melodica sounding out a distress call.
Minimalism should be the common thread between the band's older music and the particular strain of pop they're channeling here, and yet they seem at odds in many of these tracks. Icy and stiff has been the band's M.O., but its new material demands performances that command that sparseness rather than toy with it. Had the band drawn on some of that confidence from R&B as well as the instrumentation, it could have made this record even more compelling.
