Pinback: Summer in Abaddon: Pitchfork Review
Pinback: Summer in Abaddon: Pitchfork Review Plnback Summer in Abaddon ~ rrouch & Go; 2004] .. Rating18.1 , :~~ -I .' " The title of Pinback's third album, Summer in Abaddon, sounds like a morbid joke: It implies a hiatus or a vacation, a productive retreat to perhaps an artists' commune or an off-season spent at a remote hideaway. But Abaddon is not the name of a small coastal town or a resort near the Poconos: Deriving from Hebrew, it refers to the pits of hell, a place of annihilation and destruction where its dwellers become unimaginably small and brutally insignificant. The word is also the name of the angel/demon who reigns over this kingdom of pitch; he is death incarnate. It's a word pendulously heavy with slithery meaning, but Pinback's album isn't about physical suffering. For the band's two mainstays-- Armistead Burwell Smith IV, formerly of 3 Mile Pilot, and Rob Crow (Thingy and ex-Heavy Vegetable)-- hell is creative stagnation. It is the inability to make music. Surprisingly, Summer in Abaddon, the band's first release for Touch & Go, is arguably their best record yet, a logical and accessible realization of a sound they've been developing for more than six years. Appropriately, the album plays as a chronicle of time wasted; its songs are full of romantic cul-de-sacs, barroom blackouts, and crossword puzzles. The disc opens with "Non Photo-Blue", an image of modern futility: "She's posting all the time, but the boards are down." "Fortress" describes a "sick summer in bed," spending "days with the light off, freezing." Death looms over "Bloods on Fire", as Crow and Smith eulogize a friend: "Here's to the pranks we never pulledl And never will." Yet, while Summer in Abaddon is bleak, it's not without an appropriately dark and self effacing sense of humor, one best glimpsed in the chorus of ''This Red Book": "I could strangle you alii Did I say that out loud?" If the lyrics recount endless unproductive hours, then Pinback's music steadily ticks off the seconds and minutes.
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