Fly Pan Am - N'Ecoutez Pas
(Constellation)
It seems Montreal's criminally underrated Fly Pan Am have been toiling away non stop since the release of 2002's Ceux Qui Inventent N'ont J'amais Vecu. Hard at work trying to find new ways to turn pop and punk music inside out and upside down, they've taken on some company from Montreal's protean music scene and emerged from the Canadian winter with an album that's loaded to the brim with herky jerky bass lines, wispy sing along/scream along vocal parts, washed out guitar melodies, and a enough found sound and regurgitated noise to keep the whole thing teetering on the edge of implosion.
Unlike their last LP, which was a bone dry workout of funk, tape splices, and dance beats, N'Ecoutez Pas is a dense magma of sound. A widescreen, drugged out, sleep deprived version of summer radio songs. The addition of vocals (a la Damo Suzuki era Can maybe) is the first notably big departure. Half whispered, partly sung (with a nod to the Rolling Stones even), and ultimately rising to a frothing at the mouth frenzy, they add a nice paranoid sheen to the record as a whole. The jittery hyperactive proto punk/funk leanings that have long been a mainstay of Fly Pan Am's sound are still in attendance, although for the time being, their much more dreamy sounding then ever before. That first moment when the wall of guitars kicks in after a few rolling snare hits on My Bloody Valentines Loveless come to mind, especially when the guitar melodies are not so much stated as they are hinted at, and even then lacquered in a radioactive glow of distortion and hiss. Fly Pan Am's love affair with inherent modes of self destruction is still going strong, and a few tracks sound as if chewed up by a laptop (thanks to collaborator Tim Hecker) and spit back out with all the elements intact, but somehow transformed. Again, a nice addition to the mix that doesn't at all sound tacked on.
Collaborations between musicians form different fields can often take the low road of just sounding like everyone doing what it is they do, and not at all like a wholly new thing. Fortunately N'Ecoutez Pas sounds like the product of a bunch of guys locking themselves into a dark basement somewhere in the belly of a Canadian city and hashing things out. They emerge on the other end still Fly Pan Am, but somehow beautifully transformed.
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