Pontiak
Sea Voids
(Thrill Jockey)


In my review of their album Maker earlier this year I pointed out that listening on headphones on an underground train had befuddled me on first listen, but that once I’d thrown it on using real speakers I’d found an earsplitting hunk of wonder.

Good news, everybody!

They’ve done it again. This album is less of a sea and more of an ocean, from the big and deep and slow and menacing blues stomp that gives into altogether more swaggery one at the opening, to the dripping guitar chords that roll into one another across most of the other tracks, and including the little islands of acoustic-guitar that pop up a couple times. There are nine tracks in just over half an hour of music here, but the album has such a coherence and intensity of sound that listening to it seems epic—in a good way. An engine of tight, steady drumming punctuates the whole album. Pontiak have found a way to energize psychedelic/stoner rock without—as I said in the last review of their music—ever seeming to do anything spectacular. Which is a kind of spectacularness itself.