Pinkunoizu: The Drop (Full Time Hobby)

There is a beautiful fluidity to The Drop, which is steeped in experimentation, expression and wonderfully obscure noisescapes. ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ opens the LP, with a surreal washy introduction that soon builds into a bass fuelled melodic track.

It’s a gorgeous example of how Pinkunoizu manage to fuse richly textured and varied fields of sound with bounding bass and fruity pop-riddled melodies. Their ability to have a strong song at the core and surround it with an abstract landscape of emotive and obscure noise makes them a truly unique and delightfully listenable act.

There is a softness to the vocals which are often beautifully soaked in ethereal reverb along with a lovely choice of electronic and synth-based noises, as well as real shuffling drums. The solidity of the kit drum sound really resonates with the distorted woven guitar waves and wandering keys. At times the guitars scream with a guttural rock sound that works surprisingly well with the deviation of electronic washes.

The album title refers to the alterations in pitch that stutters through the entire LP, starting with the tone generator that manipulates the pitch in the intro to the opening track and continuing throughout.

There is a poignant dreaminess to the album with each track leading you further into a fantastical land most notably on ‘The Swollen Map’, influenced by the Jorge Luis Borges concept of a map that grows to overshadow the landscape that it initially represented.

‘The Swollen Map’ starts as the most conventional track on the set, with sustained keyboard chords and a tenderly naïve vocal, before the white noise, distortion, tremolo and glitchy looped vocals obliterate everything. Within a beat, the next track ‘Pyromancer’ shimmies in with its barbershopesque backing vocals and swaggering hooks.

This album is so achingly fresh and different, it takes you by the hand and leads you into a constantly evolving landscape, but despite its constant evolution and twinges of the macabre it’s a glorious world to be in. Rather than being disorientating The Drop is exciting and exhilarating. The shifts in mood and vivid sense of scene make it a really rich and interesting journey.

There is a definite build in atmosphere towards the close before the final track, the beautifully understated ’Down In The Liverpool Stream’ rolls in with a hypnotic tidal quality, concluding the story with a gentle lulling softness.