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Review & Full Album Stream: Petyr, Petyr

petyr petyr

[Click play above to stream Petyr’s Petyr in full. Album is out this Friday, June 9, via Outer Battery Records with preorders up here.]

While the band’s ties to the world of professional skateboarding are largely unignorable — nor do I think they particularly want them to be ignored — it’s even more in the conveying of the tenets of West Coast heavy psych that San Diego’s Petyr make their introductory impression. The self-titled debut from the four-piece shuffles frenetically forth via Outer Battery Records, which also has skating ties and has delivered outings from ArcticOff!Soggy and Earthless Meets Heavy Blanket, and aside from the band being led by guitarist/vocalist Riley Hawk — son of skate legend Tony — who features alongside fellow guitarist Holland Redd, bassist Luke Devigny and drummer Nick McDonnell, their sonic affinity ties them to groups like Radio MoscowJoySacri MontiHarsh Toke and of course Earthless.

It’s a sound very much centered in San Diego and one to which Petyr bring flourish of early metal and acid boogie alike to go with the heavy psychedelic crux of pieces like the rolling “Three to Five” or the earlier Captain Beyond-style proto-prog of “Stairway to Attic,” which follows eight-minute opener and longest track (immediate points) “Texas Igloo” and the 24-second strum of “Middle Room” in establishing a varied but ultimately molten and jam-vibing aesthetic that the album continues to build upon as it moves through its unpretentious, LP-ready eight-song/39-minute course. Whatever it might owe to modern skate culture, and however centered around that the record’s narrative might be, Petyr‘s Petyr offers just as much classic heavy infusion in highlight cuts like “Satori III,” the doomier-rolling “Kraft” and the Lucifer’s Friend-esque “Stairway to Attic” that the music stands on its own, as it invariably needs to do.

It’s not long into “Texas Igloo” before magmic, layered swirls of lead guitar take hold, and if Petyr are quick in signaling there’s a journey ahead, they’re clearly eager to get it underway, though it should be noted that it’s Devigny‘s bass that actually introduces the track, as it does the Flower Traveling Band-nodding “Satori III,” and “Old and Creepy” and “Kraft,” which follow. That’s half the tracklist and as one expects for this style, the rhythm section does significant work when it comes to holding together the structure of the songs as the guitars wander the cosmos surrounding. On “Texas Igloo,” vocals arrive amid fervent push coated in watery effects à la Witch, and they’ll play an important role in conveying the hook of “Stairway to Attic” and the creeper spirit of “Kraft,” but it’s in the instrumental thrust that the overarching impression of Petyr‘s Petyr is made, and if the record seems geared toward conveying anything about their personality at all, it’s that they are primarily a live band.

petyr petyr

That’s hard to say without ever having seen them on stage, obviously, but particularly in pairing “Texas Igloo” with “Middle Room” at the outset, Petyr seem to be telling their listeners right off the bat that they can and will go just about anywhere they want to, sound-wise, and while I don’t know how much of their lead work is improv — certainly in this form the songs have been structured, so don’t take that to mean they’re just off-the-cuff jamming on the recording — the tracks feel very much carved out of jams and Petyr come across as a band who’ve spent their time developing their chemistry on stage and in a rehearsal space with a mind toward playing out. The energy in pieces like “Stairway to Attic,” the Sabbathian midsection of “Old and Creepy” and the near-seven-minute closing bookend “Vambo/Buffalo Stampede” back that assertion, and one finds that even to the last verse of the finale, Petyr hold firm to this focus.

As a result, their self-titled succeeds in conveying this sort of B-plot narrative that coexists with their pro-skating gnarl: The band are at work developing a powerful live dynamic that even at its earlier stages as it might be here is well able to carry their audience along the rough-edged and sometimes angular path their material takes. Because the Pacific Coast and particularly Southern California have had such a glut the last several years of heavy psych bands — really, one wonders a bit how Outer Battery snapped up Petyr before Tee Pee Records could do so — it’s that much harder for Petyr to stand themselves out from the pack, but it’s important to keep in mind that what they’re delivering here is a launch for their evolution rather than the outcome of it. The start of a process, not the finish.

I won’t endeavor to speculate on where they might go, but as much as “Texas Igloo” signals a journey for the listener, so too is it one for the band, and as they dig into the meat of side B with “Kraft” and “Three to Five,” Petyr seem to find a vibe more of their own, with a tinge of cultistry alongside their Echoplexing churn and a red-hot rhythmic fluidity that, much as they showed at the beginning with the quick gone-elsewhere excursion of “Middle Room,” maintains its refusal to be anywhere it doesn’t want to be. Modern acid rock answering the call of a classic head trip — one could hardly ask more of an interpretation of current West Coast heavy psych than that, and Petyr do well in blending the new and the old in their sound throughout “Satori III,” “Old and Creepy,” “Stairway to Attic” and “Vambo/Buffalo Stampede” in such a way as to position themselves for growth going forward. Their second LP will be a test of who they are as a band and as songwriters, who they want to be and how they want to get there, but as a first offering, Petyr‘s Petyr makes a compelling argument in its shred and its drawl for the potential of the band to distinguish themselves from within their crowded scene.

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