Pardoner - Came Down Different (2021)

For their first few albums, Pardoner created a noisy, feedback-heavy kind of slacker pop, their angular twists and muted hooks updating the sound of indie greats like Polvo or the Swirlies. Shortly after the release of their 2019 sophomore album, Playin' on a Cloud, founding member Max Freeland left the Bay Area for Canada, and the future of Pardoner was uncertain. While living in Canada, Freeland worked with friends from the like-minded group Dumb on some experimental four-track demos. These demos became part of the foundation on which third album Came Down Different was built, with Pardoner reuniting in California and reconfiguring their scrappy sound into something simultaneously more chaotic and more pop-friendly than before. After the album begins with a few seconds of washed-out noise, "Donna Said" starts things off with a blast of distorted catchiness that pulls from both Pavement's lazy melodic sensibilities and the nervy stumbling excitement and lo-fi glaze of Eric's Trip. Songs like this one, "I Wanna Get High to the Music," and "Tranquilizer" are inventive updates to '90s influences. Instead of aiming for exact re-creations of the sounds they were informed by, Pardoner play around with song structures and introduce unexpected breakdowns and twists. "Lucky Day" is perhaps the boldest example of this, switching quickly from sleepy Yo La Tengo-esque drone pop into random, short-lived bursts of hardcore. On some songs, like the obtusely rocking "Broadway" or "Bunny's Taxi," Freeland's yelpy vocals are a dead ringer for Daydream Nation-era Lee Ranaldo, but the band take the songs to more straightforward pop places than any Sonic Youth record, leaning into dual guitar leads and tightly wound song structures. Throughout Came Down Different, unexpected scatters of noise and jarring shifts in performance and production keep the album exciting and unpredictable. With this set of songs, Pardoner join the ranks of contemporaries like Dry Cleaning, Parquet Courts, and Kiwi Jr., who don't just successfully expand on the framework on indie rock's most influential figures, but create something new and all their own in the process.