Now functioning as the ethereal post-rock bluegrass outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees, this prolific group of musicians gets a well-deserved nod to their previous incarnation as Pele. The good folks of Polyvinyl are finally issuing the ambitious retrospective double-album, A Scuttled Bender in a Watery Closet.
This stalwart collection spans the entire career of Pele, from their 1997 debut Teaching the History of Teaching Geography to the final release of Enemies in 2002. For all the perils of condensing six years of work onto one compilation, this document successfully allows us a show-rather-than-tell account of their sonic progression.
The strength of this collection owes a lot to its track listing, put together even more deliberately than the seating arraignments on Oscar night. Instead of going for the typical “greatest hits” breakdown, these sixteen songs from thirteen different releases are sewn into an entirely new, and surprisingly coherent album.
Scuttled’s arch is drawn around a theme of deconstruction. The opening numbers celebrate their fluidity through genre, ranging from gentle harmonics and free jazz drumming to angular post-rock á la Tortoise or later Don Caballero, sometimes even within the same song. As things progress, Pele begin to thwart expectations of “cinematic” instrumental rock left and right, favoring confettied sampling and lush knob tweaking in the vein of Kieran Hebden/Four Tet.
This progression is also mirrored in the track lengths. Disc one pokes through the ten-minute mark on several cuts, including the leisure-stricken waltz of “Apiary,” which tires out just short of half an hour. Disc two sticks to a more concise four or five minutes on average. Ironically, these shorter flashes are much less accessible than their epic predecessors. “Cigarette Papers,” wades through an 8-bit circuit meltdown before soldering itself to a blown-out hip hop loop.
Marking the line between experimentation and indulgence is tough for any group with a semi-improvisational sound, and there appears to be no consensus amongst Pele about where that line should be. While the twisting long-players like “Blue Cecil,” corner their turns and juggle influences, they maintain a logical momentum even when their palette is shape shifting. It’s really more the end of the collection where things get stagnant. “Hot Tappy,” is a baffling house show in a Doppler station, filled with pings, glitches, and a dry techno drumbeat. These awkward numbers trip up an otherwise superb album, but the highlights are mostly solid enough to outweigh the untimely missteps, and how many double-albums don’t have a few songs you always skip over, anyways?
Scuttled contains “over 2 hours of previously hard-to-find music from nine different labels in the U.S. and Japan.” Not only that, but they went absolutely Criterion on this bad boy, including a 24-page color book in digipack stuffed with band pics, chronological info, “drunken tour diary,” and some tasty tidbits about each track. Basically everything you’d need to function as a walking Wikipedia entry for Pele.
A Scuttled Bender in a Watery Closet is now available for pre-order through Polyvinyl and limited to 2000 copies. Ships out March 27th.
MP3 :::
Pele – Blue Cecil
Pele – Las Soofis
