Came Down Different＜限定盤＞

カリフォルニアが産んだ気持ち良いローファイサウンド!

カッチリとキメてくるバンドサウンドに投げやりなボーカルが癖になるカリフォルニア産PARDONER。最新作となる「CAME DOWN DIFFERENT」はさらに甘酸っぱさと暴走が加味された面白作!

まさに初期PAVEMENTやSUPERCHUNKが持っていた美メロとジャキジャキなギターが覆いかぶさるローファイの美味しい部分を集めた『DONNA SAID』が、胸をキュンキュンとさせるフレーズのオンパレードで悶絶必至!これぞオルタナティヴロック!!そして約1分半程のヤケッパチ暴走がリスナーをハッとさせるナンバー『SPIKE』は狙って作れない息が合ったバンドならではな1曲!!

YUCK以降とも言えるオルタナも混じった良作です!

For their first few albums, Pardoner created a noisy, feedback-heavy kind of slacker pop, their angular twists and muted hooks updating the sound of indie greats like Polvo or the Swirlies. Shortly after the release of their 2019 sophomore album, Playin on a Cloud, founding member Max Freeland left the Bay Area for Canada, and the future of Pardoner was uncertain. While living in Canada, Freeland worked with friends from the like-minded group Dumb on some experimental four-track demos. These demos became part of the foundation on which third album Came Down Different was built, with Pardoner reuniting in California and reconfiguring their scrappy sound into something simultaneously more chaotic and more pop-friendly than before. After the album begins with a few seconds of washed-out noise, Donna Said starts things off with a blast of distorted catchiness that pulls from both Pavements lazy melodic sensibilities and the nervy stumbling excitement and lo-fi glaze of Erics Trip. Songs like this one, I Wanna Get High to the Music, and Tranquilizer are inventive updates to 90s influences. Instead of aiming for exact re-creations of the sounds they were informed by, Pardoner play around with song structures and introduce unexpected breakdowns and twists. Lucky Day is perhaps the boldest example of this, switching quickly from sleepy Yo La Tengo-esque drone pop into random, short-lived bursts of hardcore. On some songs, like the obtusely rocking Broadway or Bunnys Taxi, Freelands yelpy vocals are a dead ringer for Daydream Nation-era Lee Ranaldo, but the band take the songs to more straightforward pop places than any Sonic Youth record, leaning into dual guitar leads and tightly wound song structures. Throughout Came Down Different, unexpected scatters of noise and jarring shifts in performance and production keep the album exciting and unpredictable. With this set of songs, Pardoner join the ranks of contemporaries like Dry Cleaning, Parquet Courts, and Kiwi Jr., who dont just successfully expand on the framework on indie rocks most influential figures, but create something new and all their own in the process. ~ Fred Thomas