Porcelain Tongue is here to talk about loss – the tellingly-titled Goodbye Peggy is their latest offering, a stark title for a hard look at what it means to lose somebody you love. The sophomore release from this Boise-based quartet is a shoegaze-tinged approach that implements significant elements of both emo and straightforward indie rock.
Opening track “Support” is archetypal Porcelain Tongue. These dudes have clearly spent many a beer-soaked night in a room with each other – certainly two effective ways to deal with the loss of a loved one (drinking and playing music, that is). Lines like “You say you’re fine, but I know you’re lying” encapsulate these hard-to-talk-about feelings perfectly, while the band wrenches and bends through a number of tempo changes, almost like an irregular, grief-stricken heartbeat. Fuzzed-out bass pushes this one forward, while guitars soar and scream in unison – it’s the perfect way to open an album like Goodbye Peggy and an apt sampling of what’s yet to come.
You can find this same sort of crawling, heart-wrenching, emo-tinged indie rock throughout Peggy. Track two, “Held Up,” slows things down to a dirge, pairing slowly plucked arpeggios with steel-guitar adjacent leads – songs like this usually drag on past the five minute mark, but PT nips it down to a palatable 2:11. Album highlight “Back Pains” boasts a rolling, rollicking tom-based beat with pain-drenched guitar moaning. “Comply” has the coolest bassline on the album, linking inventive drum work with otherwise chilled-out guitar ambiance. One thing’s for sure, any guitar nerds in the buffaBLOG audience are going to wonder what these dudes are rocking on their pedal boards.
Lead single “Feel Your Pain” is an exercise in patience – the song starts out with a drawn-out, swimmy guitar landscape, soaked in chorus and reverb while singer/guitarist Max Voulelis waxes poetic. It’s not until the 1:20 mark where the band truly kicks in and indicates why this one turned out to be the single. Lines like “I don’t have much to say any part of the day, except for ‘I feel your pain'” explore the genuine ennui that comes along with the daily grind. It’s punctuated by some stuttering drum work from inventive drummer Max Ball; some tasty lead guitar work from Peter Maguire, and a driving bass backbone from Braden Cook. There are elements of lots of different bands here – the discordant guitar-based fuzz of Dinosaur Jr.; the baritone mumblings of Pedro the Lion; the swirly emo ambiance of Peripheral Vision-era Turnover; the wry punk meanderings of Microwave… The list goes on and on, but rather than try to boil Porcelain Tongue down to the sum of its parts, we’d encourage you to listen for yourself to digest your own personal take on their genre play.
Finally, album closer and title-track “Goodbye Peggy” acts as a palate-cleansing outlier, pairing sleigh bell-esque percussion with walls of crunchy guitar noise. PT certainly love the start-stop aesthetic and it’s in full force here… But that lurching rhythmic play truly adds to the sensations of loss that the band has so perfectly evoked.
Goodbye Peggy is out 8/11 on Mishap Records. You can order the album on vinyl via this link.