Album Review : PVT - Church With No Magic
- Written by Jim Merrett
While being robbed of their vowels by similarly-named Yank band Pivot would present something of an issue on Countdown, it seems to have proved a blessing in disguise for Aussie electro three-piece PVT. Not only does their new handle sound more like a physics equation, sitting comfortably with their bleepy maths rock output, they’ve used it as an opportunity to start over. And from the title onwards, this is an exercise in spiritual rebirth.
Beyond the name, the most obvious new development is that they have literally found their voice on Church With No Magic. Rather than applying vocal noises as just another layer of instrumentation, the songs are increasingly shaped around frontman Richard Pike’s actual singing, and his talent is such that you wonder why he didn’t pipe up earlier.
Married with the vocals is a resurgent interest in the mechanics of songwriting. While the majority of the album leans more towards atmospherics, off-kilter beats and electronic throbs, there are elements of the traditional craft. Take ‘Window’, which marks the mid-way point of this enterprise – it’s a bona fide single, with a mantra-like chorus and everything. (It even has its own video, which – as the live shots show – this may be electronic music, but you can’t dance to it).
Given the slight reincarnation, there’s obvious parallels with Joy Division and New Order – in fact, their sound is often caught somewhere in between. More accurately, you could look at them as a reverse Radiohead, moving towards epic early U2-scale traditional songwriting but dragging the wonky electronica of their label Warp with them. Be thinking cascading gothic future-retro – like Interpol plugged into a sinister calculator.
Not that opener ‘Community’, thick with its pulsing Doctor Who-like reverb and Gregorian chanting, suggests a new approach. If anything, it serves as a statement of where this band has just come from rather than where the album is going. Leave that to ‘Light Up Bright Fires’, where trademark Boards of Canada blips boil into something you might recognise as a “song”.
‘Window’ is certainly a stand-out moment, and a much-needed release given the density of the rest of the album – like the dark matter out in space, it’s the gravitational pull of the stuff that seems to exist beyond our sensory perception that keeps this album together, but a breather is nice.
‘Timeless’ is the take-no-prisoners everything-but-the-kitchen-sink epic ending (that isn’t quite, since it’s the penultimate track), building up around a dirty bassline borrowed from Leftfield, only to grind like a heavily-buffered YouTube clip of itself. This leaves ‘Only The Wind Can Hear You’ to round things off, bringing to the foreground the borrowed Vangelis sound that’s hardwired into this band’s DNA. Tellingly, a large portion of this album hinges on the same model Roland employed for the Blade Runner soundtrack (only doctored with a piece of tape to read “Poland”).
A great leap for the band, this is one of those occasions when a step towards what you could consider mainstream appeal actually works. You can only assume that the Church With No Magic of the title refers to how effective various religious orders might be if they ditched all the dogma and mumbo-jumbo and the differences that result in persecution and war and got down to the core reason for their existence in the first place – bringing people together.