Least-heard hits of 2005, part 2
Continuing the Least-Heard Hits of Aught-Five series: Piglet was 2005’s math-rock hotness. Lava Land is a manic jubilee of gratifying instrumental tracks—like Don Cab or Hella, but more cohesive, and much happier. The DNA of Chicago seeps through each of the six tracks on this EP; they fuse uptempo jazz and rock effortlessly, and each song features at least a couple time changes and tempo shifts.
The genius of Piglet is in the way they couch their math-rock misdirections in acres of melodic groove—complicated structures or not, most of these songs have a nice verse/chorus feel, and they plot their guitar stratospherics over mostly countable, headbangable beats. The middle of “Caramel” clocks measures in 7+5/4 before switching to a jam in 5/4, but it’s not so noticeable. The rest of the song is in 4, and it’s just another melodic idea flying by. I imagine a parallel Piglet universe—a pigletverse—where the nightly diversion is darts. Except the dartboard has time signatures and tonal centers on it, and the game is to sit for hours composing the most danceable song possible from the results of your three tosses.
What’s more amazing is the extent to which the tracks on Lava Land seem to be a live performance. There are no loops and seemingly few (no?) edits. I’m not even sure that it was tracked individually. Listen to this live set from WLUW in Chicago, which I’ll host here for a while. It’s a perfect, note-by-note performance of four tracks from the EP, at tempo or faster. This shit is ridiculous.
What’s more amazing is that (although I can’t seem to verify this elsewhere online and my memory is a little hazy) I remember it coming up in a post from bassist Ezra that he and his posse just graduated high school. So they’re only 18. Anybody have info on that?