The Writhing Squares - Chart for the Solution (2021)

With their 2019 album Out of the Ether, Philadelphian duo Writhing Squares combined the grainy punk intensity of Fun House-era Stooges with the interstellar atmospheres of Hawkwind for a sound that reached well beyond the band's minimal instrumentation. Armed with little more than bass, saxophone, a few synths, and spartan drum machine rhythms, Kevin Nickles and Daniel Provenzano made uncontainable and enormous psychedelic punk songs that breathed, gasped, and grumbled. Third proper album Chart for the Solution finds Writhing Squares reaching new dimensions of chaos and excitement, with 11 tracks sprawling out over the course of a lengthy, lived-in double album. The band continue their approach of shouty vocals doused in Suicide-esque delay, angular bass riffing, and primitive drum machine rhythms meeting with blasts of noise from sax, synths, and sources unrecognizable. Unlike previous albums, however, the songs here expand on every impulse, taking longer to explore the tension, the calm, and the unknown. Grimy rocker "Geisterwaltz" is tough and nervy, but doesn't rush, as the band move casually from growling verses to interludes of saxophone freak-out. The pristine synth sequence that album opener "Rogue Moon" is built on lingers after the song dies down, shifting in tempo and tonality as the arrangement softens with the inclusion of flutes and long tones from other synth-like instruments. At the heart of the album is centerpiece "Pillars," a nearly 19-minute-long epic that builds from amorphous beginnings to a driving Krautrock-inspired groove before settling into a valley of abstract noise. At every turn, Writhing Squares take their time and stretch out. Chart for the Solution was assembled from material recorded over a five-year period between 2015 and 2020, and there are differences in fidelity between moments like the practice-space lo-fi sound of "The Library" and the defined instrumentation of "Ganymede." The duo wander through lower-energy patches ("A Chorus of Electrons") and blown-out alien blues ("NFU," featuring rowdy harmonica shredding from Dan Balcer) before wrapping up the proceedings with "Epilogue," an unhinged, jammy finale featuring guests John Schoemaker on live drums and Alex Ward on organ. It's a fitting end to Writhing Squares' most ambitious output to date, one that pushes every angle of their already interdimensional sound even further out.