Pontiak - Lords of the Prairie

Pontiak's is a family saga: three brothers born in Virginia between '78 and '82, still living there today. The eldest, Jennings, handles bass and organ; the middle brother, Van, sings and plays guitar; the youngest, Lain, is responsible for the drums. Their surname is Carney, and in just a few years they've amassed an enviable string of top-shelf releases. Their debut came in 2005, after the three brothers had already racked up plenty of experience in other projects, particularly within the Baltimore scene. From the start their orientation leaned toward a mix of late-sixties psychedelia, acid rock, stoner, light American folk roots, the occasional prog digression, a dash of metal and isolated post-rock flourishes. This placed Pontiak stylistically within that brood of neo-psych acts that initially found the most success, namely Black Mountain, Black Angels and Dead Meadow. Sounds of the past shredded through a modernist lens, American roots spun through a noise filter, five decades of record collecting tossed into a giant blender and served fresh with zero nostalgia, but with the intent of forging a new musical path. A path that does draw on the past, but visionarily, looking to the future with pride.

In the home studio set up on the family farm, the band conceived their first EP, White Buffalo, and their debut album, Valley Of Cats, released in 2006, both put out through the family's own label, Fireproof Records. These are still somewhat unpolished works, but ones in which the coordinates the band would follow in the future already begin to take clear shape. From the outset, the three brothers loaded instruments and bags into the proverbial van and started taking their songs around the States, first to neighboring states, then gradually further afield.

In 2007, again on Fireproof Records, in a run of five hundred copies, came Sun On Sun, the album that would earn them a deal with Thrill Jockey, who later reissued the record. Superb musicianship, zero posturing of hard'n'heavy poses, granite-hard tones with furious guitar solos, constant shifts in tone and volume tearing through the varied rhythmic fabric, echoes of Black Sabbath and the Doors that don't dent the originality of the result, Van's voice intense, now dark and subtly melancholic, now energetic and furious. It's an album that feels alien and familiar at once, starting with "Skell Skull", a cryptic, powerful rock track loaded with obsessive Kyuss-style riffs, gothic choruses and bursts of psychedelia shaped around a minimal melody. The following "Swell" slows things down and suspends the mood with metallic sounds and spectral guitar chords, before shattering against the rock'n'boogie structure of "White Hands". But the beating heart of the album lies in the next four tracks, poised between blues, psychedelia and post-rock. "White Mice" opens with two endlessly repeated blues notes before morphing into a mix of funk and southern rock; nine minutes of psychedelic, garage-blues for "Sun On Sun", carried by a more subdued vocal tone and a gorgeous sequence of keyboard and Hammond chords with a dreamy, lysergic effect. "Tell Me About", caught between blues forays and Ray Manzarek-style organ, drags the listener toward delirium with a visionary, anguished lyric, while the closing "The Brush Burned Fast" is a true masterpiece, an acoustic guitar and that ever-shifting voice embroidering precious notes, while spectral sonic inserts cancel out the track's apparent sunniness. With Sun On Sun, Pontiak prove they're much more than a promise: they're not playing a new kind of music, but they play it like few others have before, showing a clear vision for how to develop this wonderful sonic blend.

A few months later came a split shared with their Baltimore friends Arbouretum. The EP is titled Kale and contains three John Cale covers (hence the title). It's the first work released directly through Thrill Jockey, which from that point on would be their label.

But 2009 is the year Pontiak truly began to widen their reach. The credit goes to Maker, which revisits the tried-and-tested mix of rock, blues, psychedelia and hard rock, but sketches out a darker, more vigorous atmosphere, amplifying the stoner traits of the sound and pushing it toward bolder territory. The Carney brothers confirm themselves as excellent musicians, superb songwriters, but also fine vocalists, capable of underscoring the mystery in Van Carney's lyrics, confirming (and improving on) everything Sun on Sun had promised. Built around a long centerpiece track that runs past fourteen minutes (the title track, an incredible sequence of riffs, harmonies and pauses carrying the listener from fury to poetry to emotional narcosis), Maker is otherwise made up of short three- or four-minute pieces, fitting together into a single flow with no emotional slack.

Beyond the title track, which alone is worth the price of the record, "Laywayed" and "Honey" stand out, defining the band's more stoner side through hard-rock sounds and Nuggets-style psychedelia. "Blood Pride" and "Aasstteerr" pay fitting tribute to Pontiak's musical roots, unleashing blues and rock chords with total confidence.

It's striking how the two shortest tracks are so intense: "Heat Pleasure" is dark and leaden, submerging the listener in cascading hard sounds and jagged bursts of noise, while the 73 seconds of "Headless Conference" are pure sonic madness, condensing fury, dismay and noir poetry.

Never repetitive, the album offers multifaceted angles: in "Aestival" the band embraces the dark side of Nick Cave and the poetry of Bill Callahan, weaving ecstatic, furious sounds into the delicate acoustic ballad that seem to leap straight off the most rocking pages of Pink Floyd. Three more tracks round out Pontiak's sonic journey: they pay homage to the Seventies on "Wild Knife Night Fight", then unleash alien, energetic sounds on "Wax Worship", before finally gifting us a gothic-rock gem in the ballad "Seminal Shining", which would put Current 93 to shame for its magical interlocking of acoustic and gothic textures.

Also in 2009, Sea Voids was released (vinyl only, in a run of a thousand copies), and right from the opening it stakes out new coordinates, namely a more direct, less pretentious sound. Recorded in a little over two weeks, the album lets the band cross-pollinate their past sounds without losing their own identity. Structured as a series of short jam sessions, Sea Voids slides from robust Jimi Hendrix-style tones ("Suzerain") to the melancholic shoegaze fragments of "World Wide Prine". Pontiak find a more accessible outlet here for audiences, winning out against other key players on the stoner-rock scene.

The inspiration driving the delicate folk-song "Life And Coral" and the psychedelic trance of "The Spiritual Nurse" doesn't deny the modern inflections of American rock, veering toward Thin White Rope and Codeine.

Just thirty minutes of music, but enough to show how the Carney brothers can range from the sturdiest sides of rock (always delivered with great personality) to the gentlest reaches of folk, without ever losing impact ("It's The Life").

In 2010 the bar is raised again with Living, an album that's fundamentally experimental in sound, containing a handful of extraordinary songs. Everything is structured and meticulously planned without resorting to any cheap tricks: they sing only when strictly necessary, unconcerned that several tracks remain entirely instrumental. This time the band worked by subtraction, but the core is made of experimental noise magma, as "Lemon Day" clearly expresses. On close listening, a strong electric rock-blues vein becomes evident (easily traced in tracks like "Young", "Algiers By Day" or "Thousands Citrus", not too far from the early guitar workouts of Black Mountain), alongside psych ("Second Sun", the longer "Pacific", closer to the best Black Angels). The Carney brothers delight in building rhythmic tanks with a tendency toward noise (the instrumental "And By Night"), play at mixing sounds, effects and drones (as in "Original Vestal"), or try their hand at the oblique yet vaguely catchy ballad, winning the challenge both in electric territory ("Beach", "This Is Living") and acoustic ("Forms Of The", the chord progressions that characterize the closing "Virgin Guest").

Living definitively launches Pontiak into the pantheon of the best neo-psych bands of the new millennium: somewhere between seventies hard-rock and post-rock, the Virginia trio manages to raise the bar even further, landing just a step away from perfection.

A few months later, well into 2011, the Carney brothers shuffle the deck to present a short record (under half an hour long), measured yet surprising compared to their previous works. The band wrote Comecrudos while camped in the crater of an old volcano along Route 385, on the banks of the Rio Grande. The record, pressed in just a thousand copies as had already happened with Sea Voids, is conceived as the soundtrack to a car trip along the dusty roads separating Arizona and Texas. Setting aside distortion pedals and overdrive, Pontiak distances itself from heavy sonorities, intoning a funeral march announced by a repetitive trumpet and a long preparatory drone ("Part I"). The folk arpeggio of "Part II", backed by a deep bass and a celestial harmonium, is followed by a desert ballad ("Part III") that slowly builds over the same martial rhythm thanks to horns and psychedelic guitar textures, forging a link with the stoner-rock the band has amply proven to master in the past. The record closes with "Part IV", driven by brushed drums and an organ over whose notes ultra-reverbed guitar chords create mystical swirls that update the visionary rock of Pink Floyd's "Live At Pompei". Comecrudos is evocative and honors 70s psychedelia without being too derivative; it's a shame it's so short, but its purpose is mainly to keep the market occupied until the next work.

In April 2012 came Echo Ono, the perfect record, containing nine sensational tracks, starting with the opening "Lions Of Least", a noble summary in under three minutes of decades of hard-rock in psychedelic sauce, a track capable of unleashing the same explosive force as "Immigrant Song", to cite another legendary, stunning opener. Echo Ono is the right album to make happy all those who still believe in the redemptive power of rock, and it has the strength to set new benchmarks in the contemporary hard-psych-rock field. The quality of the American trio's work is expressed once again in episodes that explore the thousand tributaries of psychedelia, and they do so with the uncommon gift of concision, too often absent in works of this kind. Inside Echo Ono you'll find Black Mountain and Neil Young (just listen to "Silver Shadow"), Sonic Youth and Black Angels, Grateful Dead (an obligatory reference when talking psychedelia, check out the lysergic journey of "Royal Colors") and Kyuss/Queens Of The Stone Age (hints of "Desert Sessions" are scattered everywhere), Arbouretum and a thousand others you'll have fun tracking down. And yet, Echo Ono sounds unmistakably like a Pontiak record, because these lords of the prairie have created a sound that now defines them, setting them apart from any other contemporary act. When they do americana they prove far more effective than any bearded singer-songwriter, when they offer hard-rock they stand level with the best outfits of the past, when they set their minds on creating assorted noise they rank among the best in the scene, as in the case of "Panoptica", which closes the record with over six minutes of blistering garage noise and a massive onslaught not heard since Trail Of Dead's "Source, Tags & Codes". In just over thirty minutes, Pontiak dishes out tremendous lashings, but also sweet roundness: they know how to batter the listener with more ("Left With Lights") or less ("Across The Steppe", with a sumptuous bass) thunderous electric shocks, but also play with the finesse of a fencer in the calm that emerges in tracks like "The Expanding Sky" or "Stay Out, With A Sight", in which an electricity ready to flare under the skin still remains. Or they merge both sides of their character in moments (as with "The North Coast") shaped by what we can now consider an unmistakable trademark.

The tireless three Carney brothers return in January 2014 with Innocence, a new work dense with granite riffs, hard psychedelia and brilliant ballads. The start is sparkling and turbulent: the title track is an explosion of iconoclastic rage condensed into just over two minutes, "Lack Lustre Rush" doesn't skimp on electric power, and the hyper-abrasive triptych closes with the pounding "Ghosts". A direct, decisive start that shows the intent to push the band's trademark acid hard-psych toward almost hardcore territory. Oases of calm are then placed amid the folds of the languid "It's The Greatest", and on the notes of the two soft, consecutive ballads "Noble Heads" and "Wildfires". An elegant mid-album pause, useful for recharging the batteries and resting the ears before the big guitars return to grind out killer riffs, entering decidedly stoner territory with the granite-hard "Surrounded By Diamonds", an excellent precursor to the phasers of "Beings Of The Rarest", ready to sweep everything away.

The bouncy flow of "Shining" opens the way toward the acoustically pop brilliance of "Darkness Is Coming", which unfolds into the closing track marked by the killer bassline of "We've Got It Wrong". Innocence is a two-faced record that, while on one hand pushes hard on the gas, cranking amplifiers and distortion pedals to the max, on the other intends to stay connected to certain melodically electroacoustic roots. And the quality of the songs penned by the American trio is confirmed, as usual, at extremely high levels.

The Carney brothers then decided to expand the family farm's activities by officially entering the craft beer world with the Pen Druid brand: between an IPA and a doppelbock, Dialectic Of Ignorance, released in March 2017, smooths out the heavy component that characterized certain moments of the immediately preceding records, establishing itself as the most psychedelic work the trio has made. Leaving behind not only the onslaughts of "Lions Of Least" and "Ghosts" but also the Neil Young-style acoustic side, Dialectic Of Ignorance outlines a compact, homogeneous path, firmly tuned to the frequencies of the best contemporary psych-rock, the kind that places them in the same squad as Black Mountain, Wooden Shjips, Black Angels, Brian Jonstown Massacre and Arbouretum. The electric guitars lost across the prairies of "Easy Does it" immediately set a mood made of dust and bourbon, of time flowing unhurried, of controlled cadences, of restrained bpm, of almost narcotic movements, with a touch of Southern accent and the occasional fuzz swipe.

The first two tracks spread like wildfire through the whole record and set the stage for "Tomorrow Is Forgetting", which takes the Queens Of The Stone Age of the first two albums, slaps on top an untiring ride cymbal that seems lifted from Stewart Copeland, alternates it with Lain Carney's precise drum rolls, and even throws in a guitar solo at the end: it's the record's defining moment. Dialectic Of Ignorance is a less rock-solid album than others made in the past, but it has the ability to flow without ever faltering, convincing both when it shows cohesion in the central section and when it plays a few surprise cards toward the end, like the accessibility of "Dirtbags", the Sabbath-esque riff of "Herb Is My Next Door Neighboor" and the noise-bordering intro of "We've Fucked This Up", another gigantic track. The music flows uniformly, as if conceived during one single endless night jam, and yet it seems to be the longest-gestated work of the three brothers, always immersed in the ethereal comfort of their home studio, between a killer guitar riff and a new pale ale to test. It's hard to say now whether it's their finest record: what's certain is that it further confirms the overall quality of a discography among the best in the entire psych-rock landscape of the new millennium.

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Sun On Sun", "Maker", "Sea Void") and Andrea Vascellari ("Comecrudos")

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