Pivot - O Soundtrack My Heart
Review by Andrew Sinclair
Pivot are a live band. Pivot are a rock band. Pivot are experimentalists. Pivot are 80s soundtrack revivalists. Pivot are futurists. Pivot wear their influences on their sleeves. Pivot are unclassifiable. Pivot want to make you dance. Pivot want to make you listen, Closely. ‘O Soundtrack My Heart’ is their Manifesto.
Recently signed to Warp Records, home of such pioneers as Autechre and Andrew Weatherall as well as recent showstoppers Flying Lotus, Jamie Lidell & !!!, Pivot have gone from unknown in their Australian homeland to Internationally embraced in a very short amount of time. ‘O Soundtrack My Heart’ searches to capture the sound of a band who love to go crazy in front of an audience just as much as they love to make you wonder in amazement at the sounds blaring from all directions inside your headphones. That irony is what makes Pivot a great band, and what makes ‘O Soundtrack My Heart’ a great album.
The most immediate comparison to the band is fellow labelmates Battles. This is due to the focus between both bands on live elements. Both Pivot and Battles use live instrumentation such as guitars, bass, key & drums, and both create highly detailed and textured samples within their live shows. The Difference is on O Soundtrack… it is almost impossible to tell where the live samples end and the post production begins.
Tracks like ‘Love Like I’ are made from extremely dense but spacious samples, but stop, start, shift and spin around in any direction at any time. The effect on the ears is amazing but completely startling to the brain. It is impossible to pinpoint where the edits are being made.
That’s because Pivot are dedicated to changing our perception of what a rock band can be. While many musicians traded in their guitars for laptops, Pivot decided to keep both, and would treat both equally. Their set up consists of a Drummer/Keyboardist (Laurence Pike), a Guitarist/Vocalist/Keayboardist/Computerist (Richard Pike) and a Computerist/Noise Artist (Dave Miller). You can tell that they treat their laptops like their guitars. If you ever see them live you will be amazed at how much Dave can rock out in front of his laptop just as much as Richard does with his guitar.
The equality within the music is so important. The samples play just as large a part in the prog-like pieces as the guitar riff’s or the drum groove. Ambience is treated as melody, and melody as Ambience. A Guitar solo can be shoved right in your face and still feel second place to the 3 note keys riff such as on ‘In The Blood’ or rhythmic laptop noise could be screaming through the speakers and later be revealed to be a guitar riff such as on the title track.
O Soundtrack My heart really sores when it’s combining the hugely diverse influences of it’s members. Burbly ambience is all good and well but it’s nothing new, but cheesy Vangelis synth with blaring guitar noise on top of electronic samples and prog beats is what makes Pivot shine.
Pivot are a band who obviously love music and who know how to combine it very well. O Soundtrack My Heart is a great as an album because it perfectly displays the musician’s belief that a live band can be a headphone band, and that a band hugely in debt to the past can pave the way for the future.
http://www.pivotpivot.net