Back in the music industry's Roaring 90s, labels indulged in two particular types of spending sprees that were often related: trying to locate the "next Seattle" and forking over lucrative record contracts to bands with heaps of alt cachet but almost no commercial prospects. Which explains how San Diego's Three Mile Pilot scored a deal with Geffen that lasted about as long as it will take to read this review. Now, Three Mile Pilot return after more than a decade of silence with The Inevitable Past Is the Future Forgotten. In the time since, 3MP's Pall Jenkins and Armistead Burwell Smith IV have kept busy-- Jenkins helmed the Black Heart Procession's brooding noir-rock over the span of six studio albums, while Smith co-founded Pinback with Rob Crow.
If you became familiar with the BHP and Pinback in the 2000s, it won't be a surprise about what 3MP sound like: Jenkins' voice is central and can expand like an accordion in terms of range and timbre. The instrumental construction is not far removed from recent Pinback, favoring clean, surgical guitars that prod and slice with precision and a production ethic that's as arid and frigid as the desert at night. While listeners more inured to the frillier, more electronic-based current iteration of indie might find 3MP somewhat repetitive (a valid complaint during Side B's slower numbers), there's a crucial motion that defines their interplay: With minimal accoutrement, every element feels like an interlocking gear pushing things forward. When they work in relatively high BPMs ("Same Mistake", "Left in Vain"), hooks tumble over each other. It's almost Krautrock-like in its mesmeric build.
But in a weird way, what prevents Inevitable from arguing for Three Mile Pilot as one of the lost treasures of 90s indie is that they sound too much like themselves; it's a weird situation when a band who achieved success amongst a small, intensely dedicated fanbase in their infancy could return from a 13-year hiatus without having become increasingly beloved in the interim. Meanwhile, the bands who sound like they've been clearly influenced by what Three Mile Pilot accomplished are ones their own members started. But they've never really been about the big gesture-- themes on this ostensibly "triumphant return" mostly seem to revolve around inertia and escape, though one of the telling first lyrics is, "this is our battle and how it begun." A fitting sentiment from a small, well-earned triumph for these few, hopefully not the last, guys who've become specialists in their field.
