Idiot Pilot - Strange We Should Meet Here

Genre rock Publisher Reprise Records External Links Official Site Reprise Records

A real curiosity, this one. Like some kind of ill-advised casserole of irreconcilable ingredients that somehow manages to be delicious, Idiot Pilot - against all better judgement - throw everything into the kettle on their major label debut and get away with relative murder in the game of "spot the influence." Within a 15 minute stretch covering 3 or 4 songs on Strange We Should Meet Here, I heard dashes of everything from At the Drive-In to Enya, The Deftones to Enigma, The Blood Brothers to Sade. And I liked it.

The album opens with "Losing Color," which sets the mood by layering swatches of Slowdive-ian shoegaze gloss over an Aphex Twin-style repetitive mechanical click. It's a warm opening to the album, and pleasantly "off" for a major label production - certainly closer to the epic soundscapes of M83 to anything currently getting radio play. The track leads into one of the album's only egregious mis-steps, "Day in the Life of a Poolshark," which is one of 2 songs (along with "To Buy a Gun") that I would wager the label might push to radio. In this track, the soaring vocals hug the melody a little too tightly, resulting in a sound I am forced to refer to as "mildly Hoobastankian" (I hope to never write that adjective again in my life). Idiot Pilot has 2 vocalists; one has a terrific alto, and the other has an almost pathological tendency to scream something emo whenever the music stops on a dime (it's a trick borrowed from early Sunny Day Real Estate, and the band is sure to outgrow this phase, so it's not hard to look past it).

When Idiot Pilot allow the songs to unfold naturally and breathe, they work. Track "Open Register" borrows a bassline from mid 90s alt-rock staple "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth" by Primitive Radio Gods and marries it to some swirling guitars that conjure Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins. And, again, over everything: a wash of breezy synth sounds that seal the deal. It's possible that the effect of the synths and electronic texturing could be unintentional. It's clear that the band is definitely going for Kid A-and-beyond Radiohead (the Yorke-ian murmur-chants-over-4/4-house-beat clamor of "Les Lumieres" - a carbon copy knock-off of "Idioteque" - is the stuff of lawsuits), but they end up being more Deep Forest/New Age chic than melting-machine Autechre. And this is a good thing. It's this contradiction that sold me on the band: A sincere synth pattern that sounds like the muzak at a Burke Williams relaxation spa, broken up with some post-hardcore screaming and racket.

Strange We Should Meet Here is a rare beast; a product of the "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" epiphany aesthetic that sounds more fresh than forced. At the end of the day, this wouldn't seem terribly out of place wedged in between a Mars Volta and System of a Down rock-block - it's not redefining major-label music. But Idiot Pilot's spirit of risk and experimentation is tangible. The album is, at the very least, a small victory for band and listener.