Pleasure Forever's Alter boasts one of the more inane covers I've seen: three suited men with carefully gelled hair cluster in the center of a white, columned room, encircled by a string of blood-red roses. Middle guy wears lots of jewelry and holds a flower to his chest. Precious! Above them, in a rich gold font, lie the dreadful words, "Pleasure Forever." Note the infinity symbol separating the two halves of that phrase. shudder
Had I purged myself of all familiarity with this band, disregarding the little Sub Pop box slapped proudly on Alter's binding, I'd have expected some riotously bad Daniel Bedingfield-inspired dance tracks. Instead, I smirked, chuckled glibly, and mentally filed Alter away as a preposterously solid example of why we should never, ever judge a record by its cover.
Pleasure Forever only look dissolute. There's a little bit of the grown-men-standing-in-a-circle-of-roses to their sound-- these are opulent, dark, glammy songs, tugged around by cabaret-style piano lines-- but Pleasure Forever are also a fine, thrashing rock band with some heavily distorted guitar and lots of rough, lecherous vocals. Things may go tribal and occasionally skew a little bit goth, but they never lean toward the kind of greasy, sordid beat-bopping implied by Alter's Euro-creepy package.
The band hails from sunny San Francisco, and have been known, at various points, as The VSS (then with Sonny Kay) and Slaves; their current incarnation is a smarmy three-man circus dedicated to wedding bits of prog indulgence with post-punk brooding and early metal noise-- to secure yourself a more specific prototype, conjure the freaky crossbreed of Interpol (whom, to be fair, they effectively pre-date), The Jesus Lizard, and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds. They don't sound like much you've heard before.
Each of Alter's twelve tracks are structurally slippery, shifting seamlessly from style to style in a way that makes it almost impossible to accurately map their paths. The subsequent mazes can be disorienting, but it's the most thrilling brand of dementia, as well as an acute reminder of the tension and balance true songwriting prowess can build. This is not rote, predictable stuff.
"Czarina" opens with jingly, resonant piano and airy, rollicking drums; the song eventually breaks itself down into a gritty, single-string guitar fight, heavy and addictively thick. "Aeon Flame" twists a bouncy synth line with dicey percussion and guitar, allowing all three elements build to tiny climaxes and peppering the track with unexpectedly cathartic bursts. By five minutes in, Andrew Rothbard's profoundly distorted voice has spiraled into something entirely otherworldly, sneaking toward Thom Yorke vocals-as-just-another-noisy-instrument territory, and becoming almost entirely indistinct from Joshua Hughes' fuzzy, spectral guitar.
Rothbard's copiously fuzzed vocals, while never tedious, can occasionally get a little impenetrable; Pleasure Forever's self-titled debut proved that his pipes justify at least a few moments of unadulterated, plain old singing. In more questionable moments, the vox evoke a heavily eyelinered, squealing Scott Weiland, but it's Rothbard's piano tinkering that consistently pulls Pleasure Forever from the pits of overindulgence, providing already-packed songs with additional rich, curious melodies and spots of light.
The transposition of keys and feisty percussion with feral vocals and wild guitar wrangling is, ultimately, what's most interesting here: the juxtaposition is dynamic, if occasionally unsettling, and steeps in a kind of nasty, drunken licentiousness. It's hard to say why, specifically-- Rothbard's lyrics are apocalyptic but certifiably obscure ("Caressed solace of oceans sinking/ Liquified sky of fishes drinking/ Driving drifts to flash flood finish/ This is the Zodiac speaking"), and the band's instrumentation is clever enough to endure any number of interpretations. Only their dark, sinister atmospherics can be properly linked to the cryptic, inexplicably black synergy of these three men and their instruments. I don't know what roses have to do with it.
