Pseudosix
Pseudosix

[Sonic Boom; 2007]

Styles: slinky, genre-androgynous, chambery
Others: Wilco, Neil Young, some soul guys I’m too uninformed to name

Pseudosix have a pretty sinuous album. Guitars, voices, bass, drums, keys, and strings are all rounded, very smooth, and lit, softly, from above. If you’re up late, not really tired, and feeling a little sinister, you could do considerably worse than Pseudosix. All the tracks have an ambiguous, timeless quality that would make them difficult to place in musical history if you had a bad stereo. Genre-excursion is almost the name of the game here, but not quite. “Under the Waves” has some whiffs of southern rock; “Enclave” is a little soul; “A Million Shards” is just about country. There are so many gorgeous harmonies that your brain feels as if it may be wrapped in warm voile. Everything is too nebulous to confidently label. I want to slap an umbrella ‘slowcore’ sticker on it, but there’s nothing particularly slow about Pseudosix — just quiet. It’s above a whisper but below your inside voice.

These songs have the same quality instilled in them that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco instilled in their songs: that of not really having a pinpoint-able catchiness to them, but being catchy nonetheless. Pseudosix main man Tim Perry sings with just the right amount of interest (very little) to make him sound cool. With its slinky funkiness, “Enclave” is a classic ‘leave me the fuck alone’ tune about living in the titular isolate destined to soundtrack the founding of God knows how many alpine villages. (His friends can come if they want, but Perry? He could give a shit mostly. Whatever.) All the tracks were obviously crafted with the utmost care, countless hours going into their creation with the assurance that each would be perfectly slippery and vague in its undeniable poppiness. Not a bad track here exists, and few things are nicer than that.

1. Some Sort of Revelation 2. Under the Waves 3. Apathy and Excess 4. Waisting Taking Up Space 5. Paltry Remains 6. Enclave 7. Treacherous Ways 8. Fight or Flight 9. Fire vs. Flame 10. A Million Shards