The P.A.'s are back in action. After 2022's full-length psych-rock journey, Novo, led the storied band of orcs to victory against a gallery of imaginative evils, the band is back in force with four new tunes.
The EP's opener, Heist Arp, is a palate cleanser of sorts. Highly ambient, even by The P.A's standards, it sets the bleak opening tone for track two, Stolen Halberd, which subsequently hits like a ton of bricks. The more-or-less title track, Stolen Halberd's crashing drums give way to the snarling vocals and forlorn guitars the band mastered on their first record for a moment, then starts swinging again with a wall of scuzzed-out, reverberating noise. The whole track continues to echo like the opener, creating a sense of colossal space, almost as if the EP was recorded in a cavern, echoing across stalactites and the corpses of slain fantasy monsters. Stolen Halberd's crashing end instantly gives way to the slower start of Red Visions, which takes a minute or so to build to more crushing fuzz guitars and careening drum fills. This song is not unlike some of Hawkwind's finest work, using the massive weight of its heavier, spacey sound to drive home its lyricism and envelop the listener in a story being unfolded before their ears.
It takes a few tracks to get to that mystical feeling, but listening straight through the EP's roughly thirteen minute runtime, it's near the halfway point. This build-up time is in no small part due to the jarring gap between the first two songs, something that may draw listeners away from The P.A.'s usual psych-punk wizardry. The closer is a similarly ambient bookend to the opener, creating a respite from the fantastical wars depicted in the songs before and sending the EP out on an eerie low.
The two ambient tracks on either end of this EP make it feel a bit like an inflated single, but The P.A.'s are a band committed to quality sonic journeys, not song quantity. Plus, Stolen Halberd and Red Visions are easily two of the most aesthetically cohesive songs the band has ever put out, showing that they've finished refining their sound and are moving steadily towards total mastery of their irreplaceable high-fantasy psych-punk sound. If King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Thee Oh Sees had stayed single-mindedly locked onto their grimy psych sounds around 2015 rather than diverging heavily into genre-bending, both bands would sound like The P.A.'s do now. They’re one of the genre’s strongest emerging voices, and not checking The P.A's out would be a fatal mistake for any psych-rock fan.
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| The P.A.'s ful-length Novo on bandcamp! |
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