by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Connecticut art-punks Perennial are back with a new offering of danceable tunes, a stronger connection to the studio as instrument, and a newfound finesse. The operating principle is something like “simplicity is a virtue,” and they’ve honed in on a raison d’etre over the course of their LPs: art for the sake of it, for your enrichment and your connection to the world around you. In trying to bridge the dance record and the headphones record, Perennial have crafted Art History, their most dynamic album yet without deviating from the concise, punchy songs they cut their teeth on. They’ve made their visual aesthetic an important part of their messaging, so it makes sense when they extend that fascination into the songs and imbue the sonics of the album with elements gleaned from visual art to give the songs a new engine, separate from their effectiveness as anthems (and they’re excellent anthems).
The hallmarks of their sound are here: vocals never dipping below high-energy, stabs of electric organ, impossibly thick sounding guitars, and drum patterns that are acquainted enough with rock excess to steer away, like if Ringo Starr replaced Keith Moon in The Who. There’s a greater emphasis on textures than their last LP, manifesting both in the performances and in the auxiliary instrumentation. Chad Jewett has proven himself adept at throat-shredding shouts, but this time around he challenges himself, pushing his range or paring things back to the softest touch he can give. The interplay between him and Chelsey Hahn has also improved, the two of them trading off sections and subverting expectation to keep up the intrigue; the one-two punch of “Up-tight” and “How the Ivy Crawls” establishes this best, Hahn starting each track with her vocals before passing the baton to Jewett for the quiet parts, parts that would have been devoid of vocals on their previous outing but feature warm sing-speaking here.
This time around, the band is a little less Fugazi and a bit more Q and Not U; there’s a willingness to satisfy the crowd that comes with a confidence in the strength of your ideas, and you get the sense that it’s not a compromise but a genuine attempt to turn crowd pleasing into a creative challenge. As it happens, they’ve taken it as an opportunity to fine-tune more of their 60s and garage rock influences. It results in an emphasis on showmanship — longer pauses in their melodies but still maintaining a choppy attack, the tempos slowing down or speeding up for small sections at a time — and the changes come up early on the title track, which features the drone of electric organ along with accented guitar stabs, atop a never-ending, propulsive drum pattern. The track manages to emphasize space, the guitar dropping out on some bars and when it comes back in it does so in the second half of the bar, and disappears again, both languid and flighty. The electric organ comes as it’s own kind of relief, the sustained note giving your ear something to land on while the riff comes back to cut through it all.
There are soundscapes strewn throughout the record, but two in particular get their own tracks to stretch out on; “A is for Abstract” marks the first side of the record and it whirs along on single line synth melodies that seem to hold notes at random but settle to evoke a ticking clock. It sounds like the band in the lab, finding rhythms to deploy and reasons to mix in disparate sounds like a tambourine against a minimal drum machine. “B is for Brutalism” takes the idea further, the drum machine pounding despite its relative softness compared to what Wil Mulhern can do behind the kit. Both songs suggest peeking in at a work in progress, yet they both feel like fully formed iterations of the ideas they’re exploring. The best version of this flirtation with abstraction comes on “Action Painting,” turning the titular practice of painting by instinctively jerking a brush to fling paint at a canvas into a visualization of a frenzied dance number, just as instinctual, mysterious, and revealing as the title implies. It’s easy to imagine yourself in that role; the song’s riff slams against the confines of each bar and when it disappears it’s like a breath of fresh air before you get back to the dance floor.
The soul elements come through in the lyrical content consistently, more sure than ever in the way they invoke repetition to tease out emotion, but when it comes out in the instrumentation, it’s extremely effective. “The Mystery Tone” leans into that presentation with fuzz bass and an outro that almost sounds like a squall of horns without actually having any horns involved. Their fascination with soul blends well with their penchant for personifying abstractions, simultaneously defamiliarizing and romanticizing the building blocks of music (The juxtaposition of “the metronome is feeling palpitations!” with “my heart is beating like a tambourine!” on “Art History” is understated and moving among the brashness of the music). When they revisit the idea on “Tiger Technique,” presumably alluding to the shape of Jewett’s hand while hitting the bends that comprise the song’s most distinct element, they take the idea to even greater heights, ratcheting up the tension with each repetition.
Part of the joy of Perennial is the way they can swing for the fences within the constraints they’ve established for themselves as a band. They’re simultaneously maximalists and minimalists, along the path of Bowie or Talking Heads — a band confident in their abilities as songwriters and performers trying to make their record as widescreen as possible. The band’s approach is unorthodox in the present day; erudite art that says much about a world view, largely eschewing a personal lens in favor of a collective one, and leaving an impression rather than a snapshot of a feeling. It’s not mysterious or pretentious — they’re just confident that they’ve made something worth spending time with and keep proving themselves right. It’s the ideal path of a young band more concerned with creating their own shared language than being the soundtrack to the background of your life. Art History pushes that breathless sort of creativity further and ends up being Perennial’s most fun record, the one that comes closest to capturing the pleasure of immediacy, songwriting, and problem solving all at once.