The third offering from Charlie Salas-Humara's former solo project, Panther-- drummer Joe Kelly joined the fold before last year's 14 kt God-- is one of the more surprising follow-up records in recent memory. The Portland-based band known for its spazzy, sweaty live shows is absent on Entropy. Gone are the Prince-ly sex jams and Casio freakouts of debut Secret Lawns, as well as the Rapture-ous yelps and jagged beats of their sophomore effort. Instead, on Entropy, we get tightly constructed piano pop nuggets replete with overdubbed, harmonized vocals and loosely jazzy rhythms.
Written mostly on the piano (a first for the usually guitar-dependent Salas-Humara), the songs on Entropy owe an obvious debt to soft-rock stars like Steely Dan and ELO. Recorded at home in the DIY spirit of their label (Kill Rock Stars), it's an aughts version of louche 1970s pop with a puckish (and punkish) experimental attitude that keeps it from sounding like homage or imitation.
Opening salvo "Laditudes for Centuries" sets the tone with its crashing, disorienting piano line, insistent, rubbery guitar riff, and psychedelic vocal harmonies. The song feels strangely spare, despite its myriad elements, thanks to the repetition of each instrument's vamp and the space between the plinky pianos and the jangly guitars. That space is evident throughout Entropy, as pianos collide into shouty choruses but still leave pockets for breath or the anticipation of Kelly's syncopated rhythms. Ever since Kelly joined the band, he has given it a rhythmically sophisticated underpinning, moving Salas-Humara from breakdancing laptop trickster to full on rock'n'roll frontman. And on Entropy, the complex swing of his spastic drumming adds not only energy but also polish to Panther's sound.
The album's title is a clue to its creation. Entropy, as a doctrine, is about disintegration, degeneration, and disorder, and in many ways, Entropy, as an album, feels like the breaking down of a pop record. Cyclical piano lines roil insistently, their dissonant notes rubbing up against each other uncomfortably. Choruses are held together by the tension between Salas-Humara's alternately dreamy and shouty vocals or the hammered piano arpeggios and noodly guitar flourishes. Rhythms dizzily change pace. Songs end abruptly. On "Bridge on Fire" and "Birds That Move", it's easy to hear the fingerprints of Panther's AM-rock influences-- mathy piano figures, aloof, jazzy drums, an overall sense of cerebral cool-- but they are fractured, as if viewed through the warped lens of a broken mirror.
There are moments, too, in which the pair remind you of their back catalog; "Springwater", for example, is the rare track that makes use of Salas-Humara's famed falsetto and features a brief glimpse, about a minute before it ends, of the jittery rhythms and playfully buzzing synthesizers of the band's past. And for those who miss such bleeping dance beats, Entropy ends with a collection of bonus tracks that outnumber the originals-- including remixes by Portland producers Copy, Lips and Ribs, and E*Rock, which prove that these newer songs, though evolved from the band's glitchy past, are still able to be gussied up in an old guise.
