You'd be hard pressed to find a no-frills, four-song EP with more exemplary history behind it than Some Voices. Can't be ignored-- Pinback's background noise blares with critical acclaim of an intensity easily strong enough to drown out the focused signal of their recent output. Zach (more properly known as Armistead Burwell Smith IV, but Zach'll do just fine) and Rob (Crow, that is) boast formidable genealogies in both quantity and quality. Zach's Three Mile Pilot not only rarely gets a bad review, they also share lineage with Black Heart Procession. And Rob Crow's brought no less than a Midas' touch to pretty much every project he's awkwardly strummed through. We're talking seven proper full-length albums under such worrisome monikers as Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, and Optiganally Yours. And the list just keeps growing...
As such, Some Voices' four songs look like a squadron of X-Wing fighters going up against the Star Destroyer of their discography-- the odds aren't good. But when a recorded voice opens the EP with "Hyperdrive sequence begun, hit it Pinback..." and a synthesized drum-n-bass loop gives way to an "Every Breath You Take" guitar phrase, at least we know they've mastered another new angle of attack. From there, the title track coalesces into a multilayered machine of a song, tossing in a disconcerting synth noise here and an understated piano line there. Anybody recall 4AD's the Wolfgang Press in their heyday? Weird, I know, but Some Voices makes me do just that. Crow's lyrics exude a similar low-register darkness-- sort of a David Lynch-ian, lost soul tale that ends up making narrative sense in that borderline senseless Rob Crow way.
"Trainer" follows, furthering the impression that the loose and itchy recording tendencies of their 1999 self-titled LP have tightened into the cleaner digital warmth of very modern, very inexpensive production. The opening lyric, "Rubber wings/ Butterflies/ Tangled strings/ Choke the victim," places this track squarely at the end of a Rob Crow timeline; the same can be said of its more basic quartet of guitar/bass/drum/piano. "Trainer" comes out exuberant and spooky; if one of these four songs is a holdover from 1998's To the Innocent, this is it.
"Manchuria" and "June" round out this short set in dramatic fashion. A speck of overblown rock opera sparkles in these two pieces. The grandiose lyrical war metaphors of floating along in a waterproof capsule read like bricks in someone's heightening wall. And the too-sincere emotion of Crow's "Why must all those pretty things be sad, somehow?" catch the sing-a-longer in you with the disturbing pointedness of near-megalomaniacal Roger Waters efficiency. But where Waters ended big records poignantly, Pinback go for off-kilter beauty; guitar, piano, and horn trundle out towards silence after reflecting: "It's up to the trees with the firestorm." Pretty enough for the words not to matter.
Too often, EPs could easily be titled Some Songs We Didn't Get Around to Recording Until Now. But Some Voices exhibits a rare mix of cohesion and experimentation that defies the "throwaway" label. Very good things decorate the future of two musicians who toss this many ideas into an otherwise minor four-songer. Pinback's 16 minutes grow more lush and complex as they become 32, and 48, and 64, and...
