Peals - Seltzer (2015)

Upon its release a year-and-a-half ago, the debut album from Baltimore duo Peals served a simple function for its creators and listeners alike. Composed entirely of drum-less, guitar-twanged, synth-washed instrumentals, Walking Field was designed as the low-key antidote to the more frantic, post-punk-informed music that Bruce Willen and William Cashion had fashioned with their more visible primary acts. The album was both something of a somber, campfire memorial for Willen’s defunct art-punk outfit Double Dagger (who disbanded in 2011), and an opportunity for him and Cashion to experiment with moods and sounds unbound by standard rock-song strictures.

However, after Cashion’s other group—Future Islands—inspired one of 2014’s most memorable memes and rocketed to top-draw headliner status, Peals has become an all the more necessary sanctuary. Rather than put the project on hold while Future Islands field their summer-festival offers, Peals are reasserting their modest intents in the most extreme manner possible: with a limited-run cassette-only release—and one you can’t even purchase as a digital download at that. But the cassette issue amounts to more than just a contrarian act of antiquated-format fetishism—it’s actually the most appropriate medium through which to experience the two, half-hour suites that comprise Seltzer.

In essence, Seltzer is an ultra-exclusive document of an ultra-exclusive performance. Its first half is pulled from an April 2013 event that saw Peals debut a new improvised work—amid projections by artist Zoe Friedman—in the extremely cramped clock room of Baltimore’s historic Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, a former antacid dispensary that’s been converted into studio spaces. But even in the absence of Friedman’s visuals and the room’s imposing, industrialized innards, the piece—boasting the prophetically McConaughey-esque title of "Time Is a Milk Bowl"—exudes a vivid sense of place. More hazy and vaporous than the melancholic reveries of Walking Field, this sweetly serene symphony of glimmering glockenspiels, tranquil tremolos, and aquatic Eno-esque ambience is tuned to the pervasive hum of the clock motors (in the key of G, Peals note) while using the intrusive clatter of the building’s old elevator mechanism to signal sectional shifts. Fenced in by the room’s four giant clock-faced walls, Peals are surrounded by oppressive reminders of time’s passage, yet patiently play as if totally oblivious to it. But after 25 minutes of slowly layered swells, Willen and Cashion build up a tick-tock rhythm and intertwining guitar melodies into a cheery, chiming melodic passage that reorients this amorphous movement toward a linear and satisfyingly ascendant finale.

If "Time Is a Milk Bowl" feels like the sort of high-quality cassette bootleg that would’ve been a prized tradable commodity in the pre-Internet era, Seltzer’s second piece, "Before and After", indulges in another of the format’s popular uses: the mixtape collage. The track stitches together a career-spanning cache of unearthed demos, with enough tape hiss, click-track test runs, abruptly abandoned song snippets, and caught-on-tape chair squeaks to fill another Guided by Voices suitcase. While its deliberately fragmentary nature means it never develops and envelops on the same scale as "Time Is a Milk Bowl", nor strike the same emotional chords as Walking Field, "Before and After" is an intermittently engaging, channel-clicker tour through the various styles of pre-millennial indie rock that form Peals’ musical foundation, from the more meditative end of the Yo La Tengo canon to the frosty chill of the early Kranky catalogue to the rustic form of post-rock that took root on the Constellation and Southern Records rosters. And its scattered presentation more explicitly reinforces a quality that Willen and Cashion’s more subtly evolutionary work only hints at: that, for a stridently mellow band with no rhythm section, Peals are a restless beast.