Rock Metal Music reviews

The best art always confronts and confounds. Sweeping statement, you say? Yes sir, it is, and I’ll defend it until I drop. You don’t have to like a thing to recognise its nature as art, though we tend to act as if the opposite were true, decrying the marginal or unpalatable (or inexplicable) as somehow debased… but that very reaction is what validates its status. This is why I can say with certainty that avant-garde French outfit Pin Up Went Down have made art with their album 342.
For a start, it’s a total genre-smasher; rooted in the heavy end of progressive metal, perhaps, but springing off in all sorts of other directions, often within the space of a few bars. What better example than album opener “Diapositive”, which initially sounds like nothing less than Parisian cafe-jazz with a floating but modern female vocal, music to watch girls by; throw in some muezzin-esque chants, then bring the drums, some slashing and crushing guitars, weird pitchbent vocals, roars and shrieks and angel-dust ranting… and then drop it all away again, before easing the tribal toms back in and layering everything up into a something that ends up like the newsreel soundtrack to a violent insurrection staged in a well-stocked music store and featuring anyone who happened to be there at the time, up to and including two nuclear physicists, a classically-trained singer rebelling against her education, and a man who usually has to be kept in a rubber room for his own safety as well as that of others.
Shorter version: yeah, it’s a bit mental, this. 342 is not an album you can really describe in any useful way, leaving me grasping for the obligatory music-hack synonyms and metaphors… how about “the initial Casiotone preset-demo kitsch of the brilliantly-named ‘Vaginaal Nathrakh’ gives way to something like Genghis Tron doing a Broadway musical!” But even that can’t really flesh out the incredibly infectious poppiness of parts of the track, nor the savage lunacy of still other sections. You really do have to hear it to believe it.
What’s obvious right from the outset is that the hard-to-Google vocalist Aspodel has an awesomely idiosyncratic voice… though I’m hesitant to guess which voice is truly hers, as there’s so much layering and studio trickery being used. Indeed, the production job as a whole is pretty solid and packed with detail and novelty, with one nagging exception: the guitar tones seem… wrong, somehow, like they’re darkened or dulled, or maybe mic’d up with cheap condensers and played through shitty modelling amplifiers. However, 342 is the sort of album where that may be a deliberate choice rather than a mistake; indeed, given how carefully recorded many of the other tones are (and how well-balanced the soundfield always stays, even when packed with a dozen different things happening at once), I think that’s probably the case, though I still find it distracting, almost incongruous.
That may well be the point, though. Disorientation seems to be a pillar of the Pin Up Went Down project… disorientation through sensory overload and sonic sleight of hand. I’ve seen a lot of Mister Bungle comparisons floating around in the wake of 342, but I can’t claim enough experience of Mike Patton’s infamous side-project to assess the truthiness of them; all I’ll say is that, while I remember the Bungle tracks I heard to be pretty mental, I don’t remember them having the undercurrent of premeditated seriousness that seems to flow through Pin Up Went Down‘s material. Perhaps it really is just a glorious post-modern smear of decontextualised references with no particular story to tell, but I can’t help but reach for a narrative that I can’t see (nor decipher the lyrics clearly enough to hear). It’s the sort of stuff that ends up being described in reviews as “like *something something something* ON ACID!”, but 342 isn’t really hallucinatory (or at least not much); it’s more like a schizoid genius drunkard experiencing momentary cocaine-powered bursts of clarity that punctuate a kind of sullen and violent state of inner reverie and reflection. Or, y’know, something like that.
Familiarity may breed interpretation – some bands are just like that, and it’s usually the avant-garde oddball acts who are – but developing that familiarity is a surprisingly tempting course of action. I don’t think Pin Up Went Down are going to work for everyone – I’m still not entirely sure it works for me, to be honest – but I think 342 is an album that deserves to be heard widely. There’s a good chance you might not like it, but I defy you to not have any reaction to it at all.
And that, my friend, is art.