by Chris Polley
In an interview with ListenLow in Milwaukee while on tour with screamo outfit Vs. Self this summer, punxsutawney drummer Sam Hurdle refers to influential instrumental post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor as “the Pineapple Express band,” referring to the moment in the 2008 stoner-comedy when Seth Rogen’s Dale tells his girlfriend, who’s still in high school (look, a lot of movies haven’t aged well, but that’s for another website), “You're going to college next year. You'll get into Godspeed You! Black Emperor,” and then goes on to describe further predictions that, once again, haven’t aged well. It was an off-putting but not entirely inaccurate reference for a Hollywood movie, but it’s been 17 years now, and getting into epic guitar music sans vocals is still a rite of passage for a lot of young people, which Los Angeles-based punxsutawney prove both when they speak about their music as well as when they play it.
Untitled, their first official release despite being a mainstay in West Coast venues for nearly a decade, is a document of this proof too. When I pressed play on the unassuming short-player, it wasn’t long into opener “Rin” before I was immediately transported to 2003 when a few like-minded friends and I drove two hours to another college town to see a little band called Explosions in the Sky play a basement campus spot the year before they (sorry for the bad pun) blew up the after scoring the Billy Bob Thornton-starring football drama Friday Night Lights. This brand of cinematic, sparkly, and wordless music quickly became a world I wanted to dive into and never emerge. It was emo but not embarrassing, it was stately but not stuffy, and it felt like finally my life had a soundtrack that was less about self-actualization and more about appreciating the beauty of everything and everyone around me.
Guitarist Sam Takano speaks to this common experience for a whole new generation in the aforementioned interview too — how showgoers have approached them and thanked them for turning them on to a kind of music that eschewed yelping into a microphone yet still had rabid emotion coursing through its veins. The young band’s compositions lie somewhere on the continuum between the softer approach of Explosions and the cacophonous magnificence of Godspeed, nestled closer to the barely-bridled math-rock of Don Caballero or the earlier, more lo-fi work of Glasgow legends Mogwai. Giving one’s full attention to the sprawling four-track release feels not unlike hearing one of these bands for the first time. “Landing System” is as ambitious as album closers get, and being just the last of a quick run of four tracks begs the listener to immediately press repeat and listen to the whole thing again. I call this type of EP a ‘secret LP’ because you can’t not listen to it at least twice in a single sitting.
With little effect on the dueling guitars besides reverb and overdrive, punxsutawney’s work avoids their genre’s trappings like the proverbial, muddy wall-of-sound and the repetitive quiet-loud-quiet dynamic that often keeps too many artists from standing out among the vast number of post-rock acts trying to replicate the success of those that came before them. You can both hear and feel the personality of the band shine through without a single word uttered. “Jade’s Song” begins with such an adorable and soothing example of harmonic interplay that when it ups the ante to a winding, blustery variation on the riffs halfway through, it comes across as both completely natural and utterly refreshing. “This Is Not the Way Home,” re-recorded from their 2024 demo ep, finds Albert Peacock’s lead guitar in even more alternatingly glittering and magnanimous form, and bassist Sage’s pummeling stop-starts ready to vibrate your face when you least expect it, though it’s so cathartic when it does.
Since Untitled was released back in April, the band have already added to their discography a split EP with skimp, an equally impressive slowcore emo group out of Texas. Their contribution to the playfully doom-tastic titled you thought shit was fun? is eight-minute barn-burner “green hills,” which is arguably a step up from the already stellar songs on Untitled and thus deserves mention in this review too. It’s so exciting when an up-and-coming band leaves its local nest and shows so much promise to become a nationally recognized one, so here’s hoping that when the quartet graces us with a proper debut LP, the new generation of would-be post-rockers are there ready to receive it with bated breath.