"Apologies, meet apologies," Surfer Blood's John Paul Pitts sings on "Demon Dance", the lead-off track from his band's second LP, Pythons. Pitts spends most of Pythons pleading, bargaining, rationalizing, trying to make some sense of an increasingly dire situation in any way he can. There's a longstanding tendency in pop music to read too much autobiography into lyrics. In Pythons' case, this kind of conflation's all but unavoidable; just before it was recorded, an altercation with his then-girlfriend lead to Pitts' arrest for domestic battery. Ultimately, no charges were filed, but as Pitts told Pitchfork, that same tumultuous relationship inspired many of Pythons' lyrics. Even before you hear one note, you may feel conflicted about it, and rightfully so. Truth be told, Pythons seem to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.
Produced by Gil Norton (Doolittle, Del Amitri), Pythons is a sleeker affair than 2010's bedroom-born Astro Coast and 2011's knotty Tarot Classics EP. With 10 lean songs in 32 minutes, there's hardly a second to waste, so Pythons largely dispenses with pageantry and heads straight for the stomp box. Instrumentally, Surfer Blood's reared-on-Pavement looseness proves hard to shake even on these no-nonsense melodies; guitars dive-bomb into choruses, hooks turn into group shout-alongs. This more focused approach occasionally causes slight tunnelvision, songs that seem to rise and fall in essentially the same fashion. There are exceptions, of course: "I Was Wrong" dips a toe into grunge, and the waltzy "Needles & Pins" harkens back to the Everly Brothers. But there's a satisfying simplicity in all those clean lines and bright-as-can-be hooks, a gleaming surface to bury the dark stuff under.
Pythons' musical confidence is not shared by its narrator. Pitts spends the record sounding one kind of despondent after another: he points fingers, apologizes profusely, hopes something will change, realizes it won't. He sounds stuck in place, his mind constantly reeling, his next move unclear. Pitts certainly seems sorry for something; "Gravity" sees him making apologies for "never stopping when we oughta," a line that both absorbs and assigns some of the blame for the shambolic romance described throughout. Pitts is quick to paint himself in an unflattering light: codependent, unstable, at fault. "Blair Witch" finds Pitts pleading, "I need love, but the more I see love, the more I need love," an unguarded statement that suggests Pitts is at least aware he's got some stuff to work on. "If I fell apart, would you stay?" he asks at one point, aware of the awfulness of the situation but still willing to keep going with it, consequences be damned.
It doesn't always work; "Say Yes to Me" and "Blair Witch" affix themselves to a couple of phrases-- "true blue" and "sour grapes", respectively-- they can't quite rescue from cliche. Whenever the music gets heavier-- the verses of "I Was Wrong", bits of "Slow Six"-- the lyrical self-flagellation and the muddy guitars congeal into a thick, momentum-halting sludge. The songwriting's fairly sturdy overall, but highlights are a little hard to come by; lead single "Weird Shapes." comes close, but there's really nothing here that'll knock the wind out of you quite like Astro Coast's "Swim". Pitts proves adept at conjuring the confusion and conflict of the last days of a troubled relationship, and-- probably wisely-- makes himself seem fairly unsympathetic in the process. But he's not always so great at fleshing out the person on the other end of the line, which leaves Pythons feeling trapped in Pitts' head, a spot where plenty of listeners won't want to spend much time.
When I heard about John Paul Pitts' arrest last summer, my first response, like that of many others, was a swift and decisive, "Fuck you." Even as more information has come to light, my feelings haven't changed much; Pitts maintains his innocence, and plea-and-pass might be enough for the Florida courts where forgiveness is concerned, but without hearing the other side of the story, I'm still not so sure. Pythons, seething with autobiography, doesn't make it easy to forget the circumstances around its creation, and separating the art from the artists here takes some serious doing; that score at the top of the page is for Pythons, not the people who made it. With Pythons out there, Pitts is going to have to get up there again and again and sing these songs, so full of hurt and confusion, penitence and longing. We'll never know completely what happened that night, but I sincerely hope Pitts never lets himself forget it. As long as he's out there singing "I Was Wrong", he probably never will.
