Paint Thinner, out of Detroit, makes a noisy, grinding, dank and desolate post-punk sound that is brightened by bouts of guitar lyricism. The band, all Detroit regulars who have done time in loud, chaotic outfits including the Frustrations, Fontana, Terrible Twos and the Johnny Ill Band, unleash anguished, alienated, slow-tempo bangers that mix the cranking abrasion of bands like Shellac and Unwound with lucid, luminous intervals of tone not so far from Mogwai or Argument-era Fugazi. The music picks incessantly at its roughest, most dissonant and angsty sores, while intermittently smoothing a balm over it all.
Take, for instance, that opener “A Day in the Life,” which opens with the liquid clarity of guitar tone, then clatters to life on a battering attack of bass and drums. Disconsolate verses about the unsatisfactory nature of reality, the ultimate preferability of dreams, break into sludgily dense guitar breaks and teeth-rattling drums. Colin Simon, who plays guitar and keyboards and sings, wails, “I can’t wait for this day to end, so I can be with my dreams again, the world outside today seems obscene, cos I’m 28 and it’s 2015,” and a long, transporting instrumental section ensues. Simon and Paul Derochie pile on layers of surfy guitar riffs in pulsing lava-lamp bloops of glowing tone, while a rhythm section of Jeff Arcel (bass) and Zak Bratto (drums) push inexorably forward. Bratto is an athletic, striking drummer, whacking the downbeats with what sounds like full body commitment and scrambling in mad, machine gun speed in the fills.
The disc culminates in a long, revelatory track called “In Your Tower,” all glistening guitar tones over a rumble of bass and toms. Nine minutes in length, the cut has a half-real, disconcerting feel, like swimming through cold, mildly worrisome dream waters, blares of ominous synth cutting through pizzicato anxieties in guitar. Simon chants over the racket in elliptical verses about isolation and futility, and the cut blasts into a warzone just past the halfway point, with guitars wailing, drums clattering, keyboards screeching at a galloping pace that seems just short of out of control. And then, just as it started, it sucks back into itself, with a minute of string-like synthetic lushness that is just a little too wild-eyed to be soothing.
Sea of Pulp sets anxiety and alienation to music, its songs raising the things that scare us most, then battering them down into quietude with a sheer force of post-punk will. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s a good one.
