Pontiak
(Thrill Jockey)
Van, Lain and Jennings Carney have names straight out of a Breece D'J Pancake story and hail from Blue Ridge farm country in Virginia. But as their Thrill Jockey debut suggests, there's no pigeonholing the Carney brothers, whose earthy, dam-busting riffs and ‘shroom-flavored space-jams seem just as tied to their native soil - if not more so - than any fiddle-and-banjo nostalgia.
Building on their self-released 2006 debut, Valley of Cats, Pontiak recorded these seven cuts in a log cabin outside Charlottesville in four days, tracking live as often as possible and birthing a living, breathing beast in the process. The aptly named "Shell Skull" is all fat Sabbath riffs and corporal punishment-percussion, while Van's racing guitar licks on "White Hands" sound like Monsters-era Curt Kirkwood-Meat Puppets, but with David Gilmour at the mic during the vocal parts. "Tell Me About," with its bluesy arpeggios and a spot-on Jim Morrison take from Van, sounds like a companion piece to the Doors' "Crystal Ship" before erupting into a sinister organ-and-backwoods-hollers chorus, while the contrast of bottom-of-the-well sonic noise and acoustic guitar on disc-ender "The Brush Burned Fast" serves as a fitting, melancholy farewell. But the album highlights are the nine-minute title track, an epic slo-mo guitar conflagration with organ-kindling that eventually reaches a critical, Meddle-like mass, and "White Mice," whose insistent guitar line in the second half brings on the nervous breakdown that the slow collapse of the first half hinted at.
Like label-mates Arbouretum (with whom Pontiak recently delivered a split John Cale-tribute 12", Kale), the Carneys are heavy and their stoner rock sludgy, but never at the cost of being melodic. The record is more EP than full-length, and the brothers nearly turn reverence for their LSD-gobbling forebears into imitation on occasion, but those quibbles pale under this music's rough-handed beauty.
Standout tracks: "Sun on Sun" and "White Mice." JOHN SCHACHT
