Pinback

It's already time for celebratory reissues of albums from the past decade, and for some it'll be a bittersweet surprise to discover that 15 years have passed since the release of "Summer In Abaddon", one of the defining records of Pinback's career, perhaps the one dearest to their fans.

Though a product of its time, the era of the growing popularity of Death Cab For Cutie (it follows "Transatlanticism" by a year, though it represents an evolution in the opposite direction from Ben Gibbard's band), "Summer In Abaddon" sounds, today more than ever, contemporary, its emo identity polished by pop and singer-songwriter sensibilities. And yet, or perhaps because of its detached (and mechanical) atmosphere, the record stands as one of the bleakest works in contemporary music, "beyond" depression.

So, "This Red Book" sounds like a rarefied, idle version of Modest Mouse, and the album as a whole overturns the visceral quality of its reference genre in favor of an almost mocking (or perhaps resigned) detachment, mirrored in the compositional refinement that has always characterized Pinback. The comparison with DCFC is inevitable in this sense, but the point where the two bands come closest is precisely where, paradoxically, they diverge (no Gibbard song ever had the obsessive abrasiveness of "Sender").

In this comparison the purely idiosyncratic identity of Pinback and of "Summer In Abaddon" comes into focus: the record often gives voice to "low" states of mind - apathy, frustration, resignation, disinterest - and in this sense it's a far more "emo" record than many others that are "cleaned up" or that use music as a means of redemption.

Acute angles

Divide my

Path that I had lost

("Sender")

There's no catharsis in "Summer In Abaddon", only the inner constriction of dry, muffled notes, of acidic voices that never find release (not even on the most emo track, "AFK"), of interrupted, obsessive rhythms ("Non-Photo Blue"), which ultimately convey a malaise deeper than the generational, moody kind found in other contemporaries - perhaps comparable only to that expressed by an Elliott Smith ("The Yellow Ones"). It's the somehow constipated sound of failure ("Stop its too late/ I'm feeling frustrated/ I see no sign of fortress, I see no sign of fortress" is the legendary refrain of "Fortress"), of unexpressed potential that condemns one to stillness: "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream", as Harlan Ellison would put it. But precisely because of the consistency with which it portrays this state of mind, "Summer Of Abaddon" is a timeless work, a clinical document of malaise.

This is where the uniqueness of listening to Pinback lies, beyond their style itself, which is glorious when it brings Midwest emo and pop together (the arpeggios of "Soaked" are spine-tingling), or when they give free rein to their innate sense of groove, with even the vocal lines coming across as instruments ("Fortress"). Every song has some unique arrangement touch, yet each fits into the context of what stands as Pinback's "definitive" record - take, for instance, the piano "riff" of "3x0".

But, as was already noted upon the album's release, the arrangements have something so perfect about them that they come across as mechanical ("If 'Sender' didn't fade out, the interplay between the instruments could conceivably continue for months until they fell apart", as the Pitchfork review put it), almost cruelly exposing the gap between the record's admirable musical form and the depth of the human condition beneath it. "We're too late" is the album's epitaph, in the closing "A.F.K.", and that realization is the key to understanding its importance.

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06/10/2019