Happy American Thanksgiving! After a short but very hard week at work, I have taken today off (as is my tradition) to relax and watch American football.
Despite all the coming festivities of the day, I awoke to find myself out of sorts. After a failed and feeble attempt to sleep in, I’ve decided to engage in a little writing therapy. The result, Gentle Reader, is this humble entry in this ongoing CD Odyssey thing I do.
Disc 1785 is…Gyrate Plus
Artist: Pylon
Year of Release: 1980 (the Plus part 2007)
What’s up with the Cover? I’m not sure. Given the band’s name, my first thought was it had to be a pylon, but it just looked more like a hat.
So I asked Sheila. She took a hard look and after a moment declared “hat,” confirming my initial bias. So I’m going with ‘hat’. Four hats, in fact.
Also, in case you’re wondering this is the CD cover; that ring of “record damage” you see is an artistic affectation which does not appear on the original vinyl. Unless of course, you store your records poorly. Then it will appear.
How I Came To Know It: For the second straight review, this is a record I discovered after reading about it in a “best of” article on Paste Magazine. This time it was “Best 50 New Wave Albums” although knowing Paste, the list might’ve been shorter when they first posted and they’ve added to it.
Either way, I dug through the various records I didn’t know and again found a few that appealed, including “Gyrate”.
How It Stacks Up: Pylon released three albums in their short career, but I’ve only got the one, so it can’t stack up.
Ratings: 4 stars
When does anxiety feel good? The answer, dear readers is “almost never”, but listening to “Gyrate” is the exception that proves the rule. This record wraps its anxious beats and shrieks in music that makes you want to dance the tension away. Never has foreboding felt more relaxing.
For those who’ve arrived looking for some folk/rock/indie situation, you are about to be disappointed. Pylon is a New Wave/Punk crossover and the guitar you’ll hear is mostly employed as either doing some strange accent sounds or serving as yet another piece of percussion. Beats and bass lines rule these waters.
And lest you think that water reference implies some tranquil latter-day Pink Floyd shit, let me disavow you of such notions. These waters are choppy, and while the forward lean of the beat and the overall production of this record are New Wave in flavour, the visceral attack applied is pure punk rock. “Gyrate” doesn’t straddle the two styles so much as demonstrate that they descend from a common ancestor.
Singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay is exactly what these songs call for, as she spits out a repetition of phrases that eschew telling a tale in favour of setting a mood. More often than not that mood involves a lot of nervous energy. Something is happening, but the details are dismissed in favour of how that something makes you feel.
Case in point, “Dub”, where Hay repeatedly sing/shouts “I’ll redouble efforts” over the beat. What is this redoubling of effort regarding? Wrong question! This is a song about the emotional toil of redoubling efforts, of the internal demand we place on ourselves when we undertake such a redoubling. Leave those details to the troubadours!
“Dub” is a song you won’t get on the original “Gyrate”. My copy is the 2007 re-release named “Gyrate Plus” with bonus content. The additions are all contemporaneous with the original record, and equally good, so their presence is surprisingly seamless. It’s a good thing, too, because Pylon doesn’t do the usual “tag ‘em on as bonus tracks” game. They put two at the front of the record, two at the back and scatter a final pair through the middle. I think it makes the record better, and I expect only the limitations of vinyl in 1980 prevented something similar then.
“Yeah”, you sneer, “but can you dance to this stuff?” First of all, there is no need to sneer, but yes you can totally dance to it. Just don’t expect to bust out your best disco moves. This music is for a lot of ping pong dancing and getting your thrash on. Not in the aggressive metal style (also cool) but in that insular, introverted “we’re all dancing alone together – don’t look at me!” kind of way that punk has always been great for.
Some of the songs are a bit lighter in the arrangement and others more approaching hard core, but they all have a similar tempo and feel. This causes the record to blend together as a single listening experience, which is good and bad. On the good side, you can just sink into “Gyrate” and enter a kind of fugue state of elemental emotion that you likely won’t emerge from until almost an hour later. On the bad side, if you aren’t fully in the moment, you may emerge early and wonder, “is it done yet?”
This is the one downside to the “Plus” on the “Gyrate Plus”. It pushes the record to 16 songs and almost 60 minutes of music. It left me thinking that it may be better to just leave some of that excess in the studio, but it just feels wrong to pull any piece out of the record. It’s all good. Remarkable given it is a record with stuff added in.
Best tracks: Cool*, Dub*, Volume, Feast on My Heart, Weather Radio, Danger, Working is No Problem, Stop It
*only on the “Plus” version of the album. All others, from the original
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