Where to begin? I guess where Pivot do – with some scratching around amongst the clunky debris of their various noise machines, some soothing jazz guitar chords and angelic, yet increasingly uneasy strains of wordless vocals. A minute and a half later and BANG! No doubt you’ve heard ‘In The Blood’ already. Here it establishes the compositional yang statement to album opener ‘October’s sketchy, improvised ying. And there is Pivot’s O Soundtrack My Heart in a couple of sentences. Thankfully, that leaves a lot of territory for the band to cover, and cover it they do.
You’d probably have to consider Pivot a post-rock band – they mix glitchy electronics with live playing in the form of instrumental music. But compared to this, most post-rock really is insipid and in search of ideas. Pivot have no problem coming up with those and deploy them artfully. Mars Volta-esque guitar and drum stabs in the title track, Blade Runner synths in ‘Fool In The Rain’, twittering glitch-electro rhythms in ‘Sweet Memory’, hints at some of their drum’n’bass roots in ‘Nothing Hurts Machine’. The disparate elements of the different band members’ other work – Laurence Pike’s experimental jazz with Triosk and by himself, Dave Miller’s techno, side projects with Prefuse 73, Qua and Jan Jelenick – all inform what’s happening here, but the results come out in a mesh of textures and melodies which belong to none but themselves. The band aren’t scared to let fly, with the drums, in particular, often huge, but also give any bedroom laptop producer a run for their money (see the opening section of ‘Love Like I’). This blend of intimacy and extroversion is euphoric. Warmly human but reaching for the heavens. This is repeated in the manner in which programming feels so natural a part of the sound. Perhaps it’s the skill of the musicians in being able to play like machines, perhaps it’s the ever evolving humanness of the sequencing – but they don’t contrast each other – they, again, blend into a solid mesh of forward momentum, gathering in any and all particles of sound along the way.
Interesting rhythms and atmospheres are good for dancefloors, but what makes Pivot so successful when working in an album mode, is their ability to create hooks. They do this in traditional manners, such as with guitar or synth riffs (see ‘Sing, You Sinners’) but are also able to do it in less traditional ways – just listen to those snare triplets in ‘Didn’t I Furious’. By burning those elements into the synapses, Pivot reel you in and make their neverending explorations of sound all the more rewarding.
I gave away my bias towards Pivot in a review for the lead-in EP a month or so ago. The album confirms everything hinted at there and then has plenty more to add. O Soundtrack My Heart is going to feature on many best-of lists at the end of the year and has the potential to become a landmark Australian album. With the backing of new label, Warp, hopefully that will also be translated into much larger fan bases worldwide, because this is music of the highest quality and deserves that sort of platform.
Adrian Elmer
