In certain parts of Boston, Pile are beheld with the kind of reverence traditionally reserved for local sporting heroes and/or minor deities. Envied by their peers—Krill snuck a song about listening to Pile, awestruck, on a 2014 EP—and idolized by a growing army of diehards, they are the overwhelming consensus pick in the Massachussetts indie scene for the next to blow. All of which may come as some surprise to Rick Maguire, Pile's delightfully self-effacing frontman. A few lines into "The World Is Your Motel"—leadoff track from the Boston rippers' third LP, You're Better Than This—Maguire's already given up on King-dom: "I'll never be Elvis, I guess—one big, moist bag of garbage." So this is the Pile your cousin at MassArt's been raving about: the kind of band who'd take a startlingly gorgeous instrumental and give it a name like "Fuck the Police," or reserve what just might be You're Better's tenderest moment for a half-remembered dream about "customer servicing" Maguire's second-grade teacher.
The knotty, hermetic You're Better is, above all else, a profoundly skittish record, prone to sudden outbursts and wild mood swings. The music on You're Better is gnarly and volatile: Even in its tenderest moments, you can sense the encroaching dread. Pile's clotted, cacophonous, turn-on-a-dime constructions—and their aversion to 4/4 rhythms—lends You're Better a nervy, dander-up feel; even the songs you swear you know by heart seem to break off into wild tangents at a moment's notice. But Pile aren't simply thrashing for its own sake here; they're seeking to discombobulate. So, while, elegant they ain't, all these odd angles and left-field interjections are, in fact, precision attacks, laboriously plotted flare-ups meant to mirror the buzz and howl inside Maguire's head.
So what's Maguire been losing sleep over these days? Well, there's the little stuff, like his utter helplessness with paperwork, or his résumé, which even he'll admit, "while less than impressive, is consistent." And then there's the bigger issues: the anxiety, the specter of the past lingering over his every move. Maguire has a gift for rendering these emotional states in physical terms: On "Yellow Room", for instance, he recalls a moment in which his "heart turned into a fist when my body can't move." "Hot Breath" is written entirely on the body, a laundry list of physical stress responses. Elsewhere, there are "secrets in a vault that eat your insides like acid," or Maguire waiting "as patiently as [he] can for [his] heart to ache again." This cross-wiring of mental anguish with physical distress mirrors the fitful structure of You're Better. Maguire's not one to let these cognitive wrinkles go un-ironed; he really wants to get in there, to dig in deep, and the music crackles and explodes alongside Maguire's over-firing neurons.
Spending 37 minutes with Maguire while he catalogs his—and, by extension, your—indiscretions might sound like a slog, but Maguire makes for awfully good company. For one, he's onto himself; on "Appendicitis", which follows a good half-hour of bloodletting, Maguire likens his troubles to an "inflatable cross," something he carries around to make himself seem more interesting. That, and he's just weird as hell; on "Tin Foil Hat", he likens himself to both a plumber and physicist. And, You're Better, in the end, is a curiously heartening record. Maguire's not big on pointing fingers or casting aspersions; his problems, he'd be the first to admit, are largely of his own making. It's a feeling we all know too well: dead awake at 3 AM, obsessing over something we should've done or shouldn't have said. By delving deep into these loneliest of moments, Maguire's essentially saying "hey, I do all this dumb shit, too," and there's a strange sort of comfort in that.
As buzzy new albums from indie rock up-and-comers go, it's a particularly uneasy listen. While the cloistered, overdub-averse production of You're Better lends the proceedings a certain urgency, it occasionally comes at the cost of clarity. Maguire's got no shortage of material, but his words often get swallowed up in a mess of his own making, which makes finding your way through You're Better something of a fool's errand, and leaves certain stretches of the record feeling just a hair closed-in, if not closed off. You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort: They're not interested in being something to everyone when they can be everything to someone.
