Originally written by Matt Longo
How many of you have heard/read music journalists complain about the influx of releases we receive? Everyone bitches about it at some point, because it really is bloody staggering. No disrespect; after all, with scores of new tunes each week, navigation helps. Upstart indies are dicey, though — the music could be anywhere between a mess of nothing and sheer underground gems. Well, early last year, the fledgeling Canadian indie promo company Red Tentacle sent me a debut EP from Pith. It’s called fORE (their capitalization), and in homophonic coincidence, there’s a quartet of songs to jam. It was fun and raw, yet fairly dynamic, and only asked a 15m38s runtime. With a tenuous grip on the Kvelertak-ian take on raucous death ‘n’ roll, they also displayed a variety of vocal styles. Although a depraved feral bark was the go-to, weird echoes surfaced in the eponymous opener, a high-pitched crescendo marked “Counterinformant”, and a wrenched rasp colored “Pervitin”.
But fORE was scarcely revisited until recently, when I needed to compare it with the vicious earworm that is Baptisms Along the Acheron. By contrast, “Baptisms” goes a full two minutes in despondent baritonal Gold-en Steele before erupting into an agonized howl. The mostly-studio music video shows vocalist Brett Campaigne ably control the gamut, and I’m definitely interested to see Pith nail it live. His guttural growls need strengthening, as does the scorched throat, but that rich low end is damn desirable, and when Campaigne breaks into a majestic vibrato during the wind-down, you can tell he’s been practicing.
And wow, those last forty seconds or so? That’s where Pith really runs full-bore, blastbeating to the finish line. There’s an overall Southern American character to the music, along the lines of Soilent Green or Acid Bath; bearing a host of influences, yet belonging to no exact genre. Yeah, it’s sludgy and deathy and blackened in spots… but a band like Howl could be similarly described, and Pith‘s end product sounds wholly different.
I don’t know where these little demons came dancing from (Halifax, Nova Scotia …allegedly) but I dig their schizophrenic frequencies. Smoother transitions would have eased this dunk in the ol’ river of pain, however Pith feel as though they’re still hashing out what they wanna be when they grow up. Even their Facebook page lists the two definitions of ‘pith’:
noun.
1. (Botany) The soft, spongelike, central cylinder of the stems of most flowering plants, composed mainly of parenchyma.
2. The essential or central part; the heart or essence.
3. Strength; vigor; mettle.
verb.
1. To sever or destroy the spinal cord of, usually by inserting a needle into the vertebral canal.
Whether or not indecision clouds their vision, Pith are still turning ever-badass …they just need to flesh out the whole doom/death/sludge hybrid thang. Admittedly, fORE wasn’t memorable enough to stay on my radar, but Baptisms Along the Acheron suggests greater promise — as does their Bandcamp, which mentions a full-length late-2013 release. From a compositional standpoint, the balance they seek is near; words are a different story. Lyrically, they start strong. But when the harsh vocals start in, some lines — while well-executed — still have odd parts that prick my ears up; comparing the protagonists to ‘jerky’ and ‘raisins’, for example. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but Pith seem to be driving for a level of powerful sincerity and poetic imagery akin to My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost (who, oddly, both hail from that Halifax across the pond in England). It may be setting the bar rather high, but if Pith‘s stars aligned, their debut LP could become a beacon for the burgeoning Nova Scotia Metal community.
