It's not normally a good sign when you put on an album and the first thought that comes to mind is a dude in acid washed jeans noodling for hours on a guitar in the middle of a music store. The opening bars of Public Service Announcement by Purling Hiss bring to mind such an image, but the album turns out to be a little more complicated than that.
If underground rock music has spent the past couple of years skewing rough and lo-fi, toying with ideas that lean away from actual structure or fully completed pieces, then Purling Hiss (aka Mike Polizze, who also plays in Birds of Maya, a band that kicks around Philadelphia with Kurt Vile) takes the idea to its logical conclusion. Songs bend under warped tape while guitars jam up into upper-register treble. Listen to Public Service Announcement on mediocre headphones, and it can sound like watery background static. But a situation involving staring at a wall and focusing on the record while accepting its controlled mania can be rewarding.
Tracks like "Porch Dude/Slight Return" begin with a perfectly normal riff. But then the tape wobbles and the music sounds like an accident that's been reigned in and controlled. The jams are given shape and then ripped apart by recording technique. And these days, when an album sounds this imperfect, you have to assume there's a reason. It's 2010, and recording pristine songs takes little more than a good mic and some pirated editing software. It's up to artists to recreate primitive, raw recordings artificially, and Purling Hiss uses this rawness as a dominant instrument. Without these smudges, Public Service Announcement could play out as an off-kilter, potentially flat version of recycled AM radio gold. With these imperfections, though, it sits comfortably beside other sonic innovators with a vital pop music heart: Ariel Pink, John Maus, and even at times a stony version of Phil Elverum's warm, all encompassing ambient hiss.
But if Public Service Announcement finds its comfort in rambling experimentation, then its main fault is how drawn out it is. It's the risk that comes when you stuff the music with a million ideas that are about halfway there. Nothing sticks around too long-- except, unfortunately, on "Malice in Wonderland", when the guitar grind sounds like a propeller plane taking off for about five solid minutes. Beyond that, it's a challenging record in the best way, splitting the difference between easy nostalgia and a windswept take on pop experimentation.
