Pontiak's 2009 album Maker took a complex approach to underground rock music without sacrificing its propulsive energy. The album was asymmetrical and nuanced, but it was never encumbered by pretension or obviousness, and its gravelly sound gave it the feel of an old, lived-in rock record. Living, Pontiak's fifth album in two years, has some of that same rawness, but it lacks the intricacies that distinguish Pontiak's rock'n'roll from everyone else's.
Even though there are a dozen songs on Living, it basically relies on four types of song structure: riffy blues-rock; rumbling noise; gooey sludge; and swampy, often acoustic, dirges. Rarely do the styles converge in a single track or expand on familiar sounds, something that is particularly crippling when roughly half of the album is instrumental. To its credit, Living is cohesive, with the songs fluidly oozing into each other. But the loose lyrical concept of the album-- something about a "lemon lady" and an evocation of geographical locations, possibly during the apocalypse-- is about as half-baked and muddled as I imagine the band was while they were making this album.
Living was recorded on an old reel-to-reel in a farmhouse, and it sounds like it. This could have given the album a singular murkiness, but instead it obliterates the music's sonic depth. The rhythm section is mostly absent; the mix chars the drums and nearly evaporates the bass. There were moments on Maker where this was also the case-- but whenever that was so, the width of guitar feedback would shroud the rhythms, absorbing the energy of one aspect of the sound without compromising it. Here, on "And by Night" and "Second Sun", the rumbling drum fills and bass hits would have benefited from being louder and thicker, making them more than just a giant, nondescript interlude into the next part of the album.
Living does become more dynamic towards the end, with the morphing "Lemon Lady" and the tension of "Thousands Citrus" standing out as highlights. The opening track, "Young", scorches, its swinging crunch exhibiting the imprints of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple without being derivative of either. The rest of Living works pretty well as background music: I washed a difficult load of dishes without ever being distracted by it. Yet the sound of this album doesn't strike me as the kind the band wishes their audience would associate with the mundane. It seems like they wanted to make a spooky, rural record that also rocks-- but Living rarely does.
