Pygmy Lush – TOTEM
At last September’s Dark Days Bright Nights festival in Richmond, Sterling, Virginia’s Pygmy Lush played their first live show in seven years, offering a half-hour interlude of slowcore dirges and alt-country strummers in between sets of excoriating hardcore and sludge metal. What on paper might sound like an incongruous fit is somewhat more logical given the band’s pedigree; four of the band’s members—Chris Taylor, Mike Taylor, Andy Gale and Mike Widman—are also members of that festival’s screamo-legend headliners, pageninetynine, not to mention having been covered by Thou a couple times. Yet no trace of screamo aggression played a part of the band’s restrained, rustic and gorgeously hypnotic set. Yet at least once per song, Chris Taylor’s amp let out a piercing squeal, an unplanned technical glitch that seemed as if the group’s temporarily suppressed hardcore side was attempting to break through the ballads.
That side of the band is given more room to make its ill-tempered presence known on TOTEM, their first new full-length since 2011’s Old Friends. Recorded in 2016 with Converge’s Kurt Ballou, it’s not a new recording but hasn’t seen the light until now, and as such recontextualizes the band not just in terms of their past releases and prior projects, but the spaces that exist in between them. Yet where albums like Old Friends more firmly represent the gothic folk side of the band, reminiscent of the songwriting of Songs: Ohia’s Jason Molina, Woven Hand’s David Eugene Edwards and Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous, TOTEM reaches back to the scorching fury of pageninetynine, delivered through intricate math-rock exercises in the vein of Drive Like Jehu, such as on the roaring opener “House of Blood,” the knotty “It Wasn’t a Compliment (Martial Law Blues)” and the pummeling rush of “A Little Boy and His Bulldozer.”
Given their collective hardcore and punk past, it’s not necessarily a surprise to hear the group offer a set of songs that, at least in part, roars with such unfiltered aggression. Yet much as with their prior full-lengths, it’s in the moments where they allow themselves to stretch out and breathe more rarefied air that TOTEM grows ever stronger. The psychedelic slow burn of “Algorithmic Mercy” carries a motorik pulse beneath its prickly squeals of guitar, while “February Song” juxtaposes a gorgeously melancholy slowcore approach with a thunderous immensity that, perhaps not coincidentally given the personnel involved, feels akin to Converge’s slower, more melodic moments. And the 13-minute closer “Nonsensical Whimper” carries along a hypnotic chug before dissolving into an extended ambient daydream, slowly dissolving into the ether and then setting it ablaze.
The release of TOTEM arrives as Pygmy Lush recaptures their creative spark, with another new album in the works. And given that information, it’s in part unfinished business, an opportunity to clear the backlog before building something new. But what’s here, however much of a sharp turn away from the band’s gorgeously captured gloom of earlier records, is not only excellent enough to raise the question of why it was ever shelved in the first place (Mike Taylor offers some explanation in a statement with the album: “Frankly, we lost momentum shortly after recording the album”) but offers a bridge between pageninetynine’s incendiary chaos and Pygmy Lush’s prettier balladry. As a snapshot of a moment long passed, it’s unlikely that the group will pick up on their next LP exactly where this leaves off, but it’s a compelling chapter all the same, providing a richer backstory for a work still in progress.
Label: Persistent Vision
Year: 2025
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