”You’re not going to Mars / Mars is coming here”
…opens the chorus of the first track off Exhaust, the sardonic but devastating mood-setter bouncing and reverberating into the alleys through a dilapidated boombox.
Bathed in the fetid iridescence of a New York street, donning the electric guts of the proverbial pigeon, cousin to the rat of all the putrid pizzas—Pyrrhon arrive with their eighth filth outing. Mired in turmoil the world has witnessed since their Abscess Time four years ago, Pyrrhon collected their kinetic powers in a small cabin in the woods, sharpening their blades and lifting oversized car tires hooked to the tree trunks. “Bashing their heads” [— DiLella] in a room together seems to have forged the ultimate hobo excalibur burning into the Triborough night sky.
Jacked and unchained, this work finds the band in acuate focus with little meandering passages and astutely pointed grooves, hits and frank ferocity. When one looks upon the fortified history of Willowtip, there are distinct records that are seen as staples of the catalog—Exhaust in a certain light feels like the reinvigorated chapter where the pages of those classic books have been scattered over Broadway, singed, torn, utter particle dust.
“This album is about burning out, breaking down, and giving up in America…” echoes into the urban abyss sculpted with stolen chrome and junk parts from the abandoned South Street Seaport by the quartet. As a true litmus test—the lyrics here should be read independent of the music first, then engulfed fully to truly be appreciated.
“It drains a man / To stay on the road / Wouldn’t have guessed / This engine / could still go / No destination / Just driving to drive / I’m racking up mileage / Waiting for that final / Faded sign”
The fable of the downtrodden man, surprised at his will to trudge through a forsaken earth is not merely a parable here. The cars engulfed in flames here are as real as the rain that washes into the canals of the city, taking with it the remains of memory, unresolved pain and all the stench of Monday’s shoveling of garbage into the stained and twisted maw of the morning’s trucks. There is nothing extra in these streets. There are no extra notes. Sinewy bends cascading into the ride cymbals cascading into the Schweg snare blasts cascading into Moore’s manic preacher clenches of the throat cascading into a Malave groove smoother than a seal riding a snowboard of bubbling slime, “The Greatest City On Earth” proclaims “I just wanna go home”.
“Strange Pains” recalls a familiar scene of Dimitri M scaling the rafters at First Unitarian, only to descend unto the stage and blow a fireball into the crowd. Mathematics in Metal but dirty and unhinged and this lesson is one you may want to unlearn as the walls come down. “Out Of Gas” is the perfectly situated composition, deadset in the middle of the record. All Gira recall be damned. This is a house owned by Marston not Mosimann. The quieter bits demand attention, the louder dregs give pause. Every song has a hook. This is not genre music, this is not passive self-reference. This is work that begs to be experienced live. Out of the cabin, out of the shackled bars lining 5th Avenue, out of the homes reeking of sadness and ache. In its ironically ruthless way—this music is life-affirming. This record and work recalls a time when bands had fun and their sole mission was to decimate everything in its path and the “Last Gasp” the crowd felt was exhilaration and not death.
