Words by Jason Lee
Released on the March 1st, 2024 by those heavenly dogs over at Kanine Records we figured it was fitting to wait til 3/15 to review Punchlove’s debut long-player Channels cuz much like the Shakespearean soothsayer’s well-known premonition “beware the Ides of March” there’s likewise a sense of dream(pop) logic and surrender to the void in their music should you lend the Brooklyn band your ears ultimately residing in the uncanny valley between rapturous reverie and oblivion on an album that does indeed feel like channel surfing but not on a TV set more like inside someone’s psyche riding hazy waves of textured sound from one neural impulse to the next…
……and much like the Bard’s way with language Channels balances its stately, poetic proclivities with visceral and sometimes downright vicious tendencies (“lets carve him as a dish fit for the gods / not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds”) opening with a 57-second palate cleanser called “Locusts (Intro)” its languorous drift and ambient day-at-the-beach backing at first masking the fact that truth be told you’ve been dropped into the eye of a hurricane thus foreshadowing one of the LP’s major themes (in our own highly subjective reading, that is) of accepting one’s fate no matter how ill-fated it may turn out to be cuz really who ever heard of locusts being a good omen and by the end of those 57 seconds the insects are clearly swarming…
…which transitions directly into the next track “Breeze” with only the audible click of an effects pedal signaling the switchover and here we’re on more stable shoegazy ground with a guitar intro that’s almost pure texture with its signal seemingly fed into a Boss™ Cuisinart pedal set to pureé soon after wedded to pristinely clean (by way of contrast) drums and bass locked into a tight syncopated groove with airy indecipherable vocals over the top that is until the song lets loose the dogs of wars to paraphrase one Willy Shakes…
…with “Breeze” repeatedly turning itself inside-out across a series of breakdown sections sustained by a single thrumming note on bass and a chorus of airy vocals and various hissing and clanking noises too as if it the song were recorded in a dank boiler room in a basement (fun fact: Channels was in fact recorded and produced in the basement of band’s Bushwick house) before launching into a grungy Monster Riff™ after the last breakdown ca. 2:53 followed by a spasm of pitch-shifted guitar fragments then a series of tremulous orchestral keyboard chords like Angelo Badalamenti on a brown acid trip tho’ all this happens in a span of seconds and I’ll bet you anything Punchlove are big fans of Iannis Xenakis…
…not only cuz of the obvious musique concréte connections—for example check out the sonic collage that closes track 10 “Elapse”—but also in seemingly approaching the LP not merely as a collection of “songs” but as much a series of interconnected “tone poems” (there’s little-to-no total silence between the individual songs which instead blend seamlessly or shift abruptly from one to the next with almost every track dissolves into noise or static of some sort towards the end—comprised not only of melodies and rhythms as raw materials but also sound itself treated as a standalone element that get ssculpted into ever-shifting series of sonic configurations…
…and if you ever catch Punchlove on stage you’ll surely notice the wide array of pedals and other sound manipulating thingamajigs and doodads littering the stage amidst multi-instrumentalists Jillian Olesen, Ethan Williams, Joey Machina, and Ian Lange-McPherson which they use to manipulate the various live-produced acoustic and electronic sounds in real-time accompanied by visual artist Viz Wel who likewise produces live projections, shooting and manipulating video footage in real time, projected the resulting hyper-saturated visual noise-infused imagery over the entirety of the stage and its inhabitants which only enhances the already cinematic impact of Punchlove’s music…
…but don’t get it twisted cuz their shows don’t happen at academic Sound Studies conferences but rather in dark, dingy dens of inquiry and local speakeasies (tho’ they are currently touring, see below!) and the band certainly know there’s more than one way to RAWK as amply proven by the third track “Screwdriver” which if this were 1996 its music video would surely be all over 120 Minutes and would most likely score Punchlove at least a second-stage slot on the coming summer’s Lollapalooza tour not to mention getting a choice placement on the first season of Daria debuting the next year…
…which speaking of nostalgia Punchlove co-vocalist/guitarist/bassist/saxophonist-if-needed Jillian Olesen says the song is about “the uncanny ability of the brain to change memories from nuanced to nostalgic and from complicated to unrealistically simple” which is maybe why it’s is one of Punchlove’s most straight-ahead songs but also why it turns uncanny towards the end with various synth burbles and spoken-word samples and strange radio transmissions from another star converging to transform the song’s conclusion into a reprise of its main hook but slowed down and sludged out collapsing into a squalling cacophony of feedback and sustain like untidy memories that won’t stay submerged in the subconscious mind or to quote its lyrics directly: “memory’s a minefield…and it’s my favorite lie”…
…or maybe the song just ends this way cuz it sounds cool speaking of which the next track is called “Pigeon” and here the pendulum swings to the other end of the band’s sonic spectrum floating slowly by like a mammoth sized iceberg drifting across dark waters with every detail of its slick yet jagged surface alternately exposed and submerged as turbulent ice-cold waters lap against its edges and this is what we meant by sculptural cuz if you enjoy getting lost in mutating, swirling textures this is the track for you and given its woozy sound we can only surmise that “Pigeon” is about the species of pigeon native to New Zealand famed for punch-drunkenly falling out of trees due to partaking in too many alcohol-infused fermented berries but hey it’s just a guess..
…and we’re not even halfway thru the record yet but rest assured there’s plenty more compelling tunes and textures to come like on the breakout single “Dead Lands” which has over 200K streams, sorry OVER 200 STREAMS, on a certain notoriously miserly streaming service and one can only hope it’s given Punchlove the budget to at least buy a pack of turkey-leg flavored Cheetos at their local weed bodega store which is an impressive feat for a song Stereogum called “a beautiful reckoning with the void” as in a reckoning with mortality (“I know the strongest fire / will fall victim to the rain”) and our inability to choose our own fate (“I’m so far from where I’d planned / pulled into the ground on which I stand”) like good ol’ Cassius said the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, a song that’s only out-lavished by swooning LP closer “Corridor” which leads the listener gently out the door into the good night…