On their last disc, Oo-ee-oo, Peeesseye went underground with a subterranean scowl, fashioning a scary series of demon folk, sparse and ominous. The album made few concrete stabs and evil in earnest, but there was darkness aplenty, and whatever was happening in the shadowy corner surely wasn’t anything innocent. On Commuting Between the Surface and the Underworld, the Brooklyn lads include a shortened version of “Oo-ee-oo,” but the disc works its black magic from other angles, though the trio’s bleak pathos never relents.
The condensed “Oo-ee-oo” that opens Commuting Between the Surface and the Underworld is obviously a leaner monster than the album length recording that preceded it, and while the truncated duration leaves less time for the music to make skin crawl, this newer version is more focused and potent, equally creepy in far less time. And while it clocks in at less than thirteen minutes, the aura of malevolence crafted by the album’s first track permeates the rest of the disc. Dark, distinct folk passages make up much of “Ballad of Fine Decay,” but a good deal of Commuting Between the Surface and the Underworld is crafted in a more abstract manner, as with the the drones of “Finger Star Leaf.” “Distant Mud,” which closes the album, is its most interesting track, in that it serves as a compendium of sorts; combining many of Peeesseye’s approaches without quoting any, it wraps up the disc in an suitable fashion, alternating from a glitchy sludge into drone, with acoustic guitar all the while and vocal incantations that veer towards silliness, but luckily stop just short. The track introduces horns into the mix, and seems headed towards an almost uplifting end before it stumbles, and, clattering, comes to a fittingly fragmented conclusion (aside, of course, from the twenty-minute bonus track, which features what sounds like field recordings of what sounds like a sheep or goat bleating over a warped religious radio station).
Peeesseye do well in reigning in their sinister side, not mining it to an excessive (and wholly unbelievable) degree, and largely rely more on atmosphere to provide the chills than anything too heavy-handed or overt. The toe the line dangerously a few times over the course of Commuting Between the Surface and the Underworld, but are mainly able to avoid anything overly clumsy or obvious. And just as the idea of real evil lurking in the dark corners of the world is often infinitely more scary than the more fantastical inventions of scary childhood lore, Peeesseye are at their best when the scary side of their music is at its most organic.
