The influences in Pattern Is Movement's signature brand of weird-rock are tough to peg-- the best I can come up with is Pythagoras. Their songs are composed using discreet musical shapes, more often sharp-edged than rounded. "Never Liked This Time of Day", for instance, has a couple of drum shapes, a few keyboard shapes, and a pair of vocal shapes, with guitar modules waiting in the wings, and it combines them like Legos to build a song that sounds like it could be a chart hit assembled incorrectly.
This, the band's second album, was engineered and produced (you might say co-constructed) by Scott Solter, who was then handed back the tapes to deconstruct them and create a sort of Stowaway dub side, using nothing but the sounds on the tapes. You can imagine that music so oddly constructed in the first place would present a feast for a remixer, and Solter's approach is to explode the songs and pluck just a few elements for his re-imaginings. Where Stowaway can sometimes sound like four arcade games being played simultaneously, Canonic is dark, weird, and even more abstract than its source.
My favorite odd couple from the two records is "It's the Wine" and the dub "In Tape Grass". "It's the Wine" begins with meandering verses, as keyboards and vocals double each other in clipped, woozy phrases. "It's the wine/ That makes your/ Kisses warm," sings Andrew Thiboldeaux as drummer Chris Ward holds down a steady backbeat. It's pieced together like a slot car track, veering off at funny angles with only the slightest hints from Ward that something is about to go down. The song gets better as it continues, winding up in a slashing groove topped with ragged guitar and keyboards that sound like an ice cream truck signaling us to evacuate before the bomb drops.
Solter attacks it with destructive glee, building a sculpture mostly out of the small details of "It's the Wine" that you don't pay much attention to. He takes individual drums hits and builds them into a simple rhythm that morphs as easily as mercury, beginning raw and alone and palpitating into more spastic shapes as the music demands. The keyboards are freed from the vocals, and the rhythm guitar from the verse gets its own spotlight at the climax.
Both records have their flaws and tracks that don't work quite as well as the others. Stowaway has opener "Maple", where the vocal, doubled by electric piano, is just too disorienting, and the middle of "People and Touch", where the repetition of the phrase "Can I buy this back here?" feels designed to frustrate the nerves. But the slide guitar interlude in "Two Voices for Two Sections" and the surprising human heart that beats at the center of "She Already Knows It" offer redemption enough for those. "Talk Back To Me" is just a cool, warped rock song, with a rubbery chorus and quiet, bleating verses intuitively loud.
"In Glasstone", Solter's analog to "Talk Back To Me", pulls Thiboldeaux's chorus vocal like taffy and makes a hook out of a secondary melodic phrase, shoving the verse vocals all the way to the back so they sound trapped and far less plaintive than the originals. On "Abrade the Beat", he turns "Silver Queen" completely inside out, tossing Thiboldeaux into an echoing canyon of drums to fend off keyboard phrases that slice in seemingly at random. His version of "She Already Knows It"-- "Diamond Back"-- doesn't do much, though, and winds up floundering in shapeless static.
Taken together, the two albums form a unique sort of call-and-response where you can listen to a song and then immediately go to its alter-ego for a different perspective. Stowaway is a little too heady at times, and doesn't quite have the immediate teeth of PIM's debut, The (Im)possibility of Longing, but it's still a head-spinning record full of unique ideas. Canonic is like the weirdest member of a weird family, the one who's kept away from the neighbors, slowly going mad trying to put together puzzles. It's ultimately a completely different piece of music, but it shares a cantankerous spirit with its source. You could certainly listen to each separately, but they're much more rewarding as a pair.
