Prettiest Eyes – Volume 3
It’s hard to imagine the level up from Prettiest Eyes’ intense last LP, Pools, but the Puerto Rico/Mexico-via-L.A. three-piece have found it on Volume 3. Much more inventive on record than they are with their album titles, this third outing of post-industrial/electro-punk is heavier on the digital noise than it is on their previous analogue garage-psych offerings, but it’s just as uncompromising – those same blasts of radiated noise still hiding in plain sight alongside more frequent beats. And, with half the running order comprising 2-minute blasters, none of it hangs around either!
Punctuating the stomping mayhem come melancholy meanders and minimal, weird collections of stoned FX, but Volume 3 parties hard for the most part and does so both in Pachy Garcia’s native tongue and also in limited, blunt-force English. Robotic song titles repeat themselves forcefully nearly as often the marauding drum patterns, needling pulses clattering around skeletal synth-punk structures and Suicide-like screeching. Skittering grooves bleed into itchy boogies, the resultant sci-fi-inflected herky-jerk reverbed way out to indistinction. Consequently organ-indebted tracks like “I Don’t Know” are just wild, dropping out to nothing only to return with downright crazy chatter and yet, for example, on “No More Summer” it can all suddenly coalesce into an entirely dancefloor-ready dose.
There are nods to New Order and The Rapture’s early klaxons via the painful industrionix of “Mr. President”, hints of HEALTH in “The Shame” and even PiL during the punk-funk riot “Marihuana”, but Prettiest Eyes remain decidedly their own dark proposition, “Nekrodisco”, for example, a pure piece of underground filth that’s nonetheless delivered in tongue-in-cheek fashion and it’ll slay on the sweaty circuit. The mind boggles as to what the band could deliver when they next level-up.
Best track: “Nekrodisco”
~Volume 3 is released July 12th 2019 via Castle Face.~