Pink Mountain

Pink Mountain

(Frenetic)

Record Review by Michael Byrne

Previously published in Williamette Week

I will, thanks to Pink Mountain, never use the words “chaos,” “bedlam,” or “anarchy” again to describe improv music.  Bullshit cop-outs: blithe ways of describing compositions pop music doesn’t require a language for.  It just ain’t going to fly anymore.  The songs on Pink Mountain’s self-titled debut, while flecked with rock meltdown, jazz groove, and covert Eno-esque soundscape, follow the prescriptions of none of them, creating their own and casually burning them down before the next track.

Pink Mountain, sharing membership between Portland and the Bay Area, is an odd supergroup from odd realms. The Bay contingent–Kyle Bruckmann, John Shiurba, and Scott Rosenberg–are rooted in old guard classical and jazz improv scenes spanning the country (Chicago, New York, San Francisco), while all having their own punk and rock deviations in spaz-prone bands Lozenge, Molecules, and Thinking Fellers Union 282 (respectively).  For Portland member Sam Coomes, this seems a natural step, a wide open space to thrash about in as much as he damn well pleases, a desire almost embarrassingly apparent in recent Quasi (a band not naturally spaz-prone.)

And thrash he does. “No (Yeah)” is an arrhythmic freak-out of screeching guitar, throbbing bass, and Coomes alternating broken howls of “NOOOOO” and “YEEEAAAHHH.”  Or, on “Deus Ancien” a track that begins with a fragile pattern of slow organ progressions filled with madman saxophone fits, which are which are gradually replaced by guitar seizures, eventually consuming the whole song in a giant noise swell: indeed, burning it down.  We find the same burning later in what could be that tracks converse, “1000 Miles of Sand,” which, rather, smolders in a tense wavering synth line that leaves no memory or impression to be erased or deconstructed at all.  It’s a provisional composition, like the rest of the disc, and that’s something entirely different from anarchy.