Pseudosix’ debut, Days of Delay (2003), should have been far more critically lauded than anything released by The Shins, Iron and Wine, or My Morning Jacket. Though all four bands share touchstones, Pseudosix couldn’t be as easily pegged, nor did they sacrifice a single smudge of their dark alley drear. They elevated mood above genre and lineage, the result being an existentially fitful and desolately beautiful album that reeked of last calls and lost causes. Sure, you could say something like Gram Parsons and Galaxie 500 playing for the tumbleweeds in a ghost town, but every single Pseudosix track had so much detail in its intimacy that you’d be better off using storyboards to set the scene than you would be evoking bands to draw the comparisons. Tim Perry sings as if the world is closing in on him, an introverted croon, with such sneak and surrender that he could howl full blast in front of a candle and only bend the fire.
That’s no insult, mind you; the eerie quietude in his cadence is the campfire in the middle of the songs, a reprieve from the melancholy hollows and pregnant emptiness in the album’s architecture. But Days of Delay wasn’t merely the soundtrack for getting the vertical slits in your wrists just the right depth; it was a record where the misery was communally redeemed, particularly when the band would break into harmonizing rounds, drunken Stein-raising elegies to the sinking of the Sloop John B. The crescendos and the fulsomeness seem more front and center on the band’s follow up. Opener, “Some Sort of Revelation” plays to a warmer room, the descending stair piano gets swarmed in harmonies so huge that they drown the sorrowful subject matter in majestic, towering volume. “Apathy and Excess” coyly belies its subject matter, taking a sexy acoustic riff and vocals ladled out with slink and shoulder shake to deliver lines like “there’s nothing in this world that’s worthy of your murderous mind”. Pseudosix hasn’t made any concession on principle, but they have made more room for light, allowing songs a few harmonies to act as slivers of cathedral light, a bit of California Dreaming lilting into the cracks in the floor. The album is bolder and better for it.
If this review gushes to the point of sycophancy, it’s only because Pseudosix deserves more than just a fair shake on a rigged bet. They deserve to a wider frame of acclaim, making music with more depth, soul, and goose-bump emotional punch than hundreds of other bands tinkling the keys, scribbling some slide guitar in, and then calling themselves the sensitive lads who never get the girl. Pseudosix will confound you, cotton you in cold comfort, and salvage your deepest brokenness by rendering it unbearably beautiful. Not even Cat Power cuts this close to the bone.
--Terry Sawyer
