Pontiak

Fog. Shadows on the horizon. Low lights sketch the outline of three bearded figures. A very low frequency runs through the earth, shaking bones, bringing down walls. What remains is a desert. What remains is the night. And three brothers painting a boundless landscape. Pontiak start to play.

Ending up in Milan on a November evening, with the midweek Champions League match on, the Po Valley haze in the air, and a band that had passed through the same parts a few months earlier making a good impression, sure, but nothing to marvel at, could have felt like a trip for nothing. Instead, right at the doors of the Magnolia there's already a nice surprise: a free concert! What's more, it turns out there won't be the usual handful of stragglers, but well over fifty people. And the atmospheric magma of the three Carney brothers takes shape from a single bass rumble, as low as it can possibly go, left to vibrate for a good two minutes, making everything in the room shake.

What follows is a single, unbroken run of roughly an hour of the hard-blues-psychedelia the trio has by now mastered. Everything becomes sound, an element of a (sonic) imaginary; there's no moment where you can step outside the air you're breathing. There's no pause, not even tuning an instrument, which becomes just another thread in a general flow that expands into your ears until it touches the optic nerve, sending it into a blackout bordering on hallucination: land as far as the eye can see appears under an enormous sky, a wild yet placid nature - not by chance, the band hails from Virginia. Drawing up a precise setlist would be misleading, not to mention pretty much impossible, given how easy it was to lose yourself in the tightness of a live set played at extremely high levels, which came across more as one long suite than a succession of songs. The individual tracks were clearly identifiable and very close to their studio versions - they moved from songs off early albums like "White Hands" or "Shell Skull" through to material from the latest "Living" - but they were all merged into one another, immersed in an overall atmosphere that decisively prevailed over the pleasure of recognising any single song.

Pontiak delivered a set that proved they're a cut above almost every band they're compared to, so much so that, next to them, the comparison with Black Mountain a few weeks back tips decisively in favour of the Carney brothers. They have considerable skill and technical ability - few in the whole cauldron of the new 70s-oriented wave can find sonic solutions as notable as theirs - as well as a perfect, well-honed chemistry, proof that being brothers occasionally does come in handy. The only flaws were vocals mixed excessively low and a relatively short set, which let the crowd go right at the peak of the excitement. But given the free ticket, there's really nothing to complain about.

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