Now You Know It Still Feels the Same＜Black Vinyl/限定盤＞

Estonian noise pop band Pia Fraus celebrated the 20th anniversary of their 2001 debut album by revisiting the genesis of the group. Now You Know It Still Feels the Same contains re-recordings of songs the group wrote between 1998 and 2000, including tracks that appeared on their debut album as well as material that hadnt previously seen the light of day. By the bands admission, they were teenagers when they started and had no prior musical experience, so they spent their first few years teaching themselves how to play their instruments and write songs. Their first album was a self-released CD-R that showed promise but sounded sloppy and demo-like, and also contained a few remixes, pointing towards the electronic directions the band would sometimes explore. The actual songs were uniformly excellent, however, and these revisited takes benefit from two decades of refinement, retaining the youthful spirit of the originals while benefitting from better production and tighter musicianship. Most of these songs are driving indie pop tunes coated in heavy guitar distortion and rich synths, accompanied by lyrics that express a rush of feelings, with anxious anticipation at the forefront. Tracks like the jangly Wonderful Nothing are charmingly naive, both due to sentiments like you are my teddy bear as well as the bubblegummy melodies, which remain sweet no matter how many layers of distortion are piled on them. The album slows down to a crawl midway with the darker, rainier In Mind, and Prig is a bit breezier, but still contains an undercurrent of fear. After that, the album blooms again, and the songs generally keep to brisk tempos, with all of the conflicting emotions seemingly excised by the final track, Plastic World, a surf-tinged list of things that have all turned to plastic. With this release, Pia Fraus have come full circle, returning to the essence of what drove them to start creating music in the first place, and producing definitive versions of the still-impressive material that sent them out on their path. ~ Paul Simpson