Laura Kerry
In the style of the band in question, let’s launch right into it: Pavo Pavo’s new album is exciting from its very first notes. Young Narrator in the Breakers opens with two strong, lush synth chords that give way to a deep ascending bassline, joined soon by other shimmering accents of synth and a female-led melody that sounds distant but completely clear. “Ran Ran Run” is a sign of things to come on the young band’s astounding debut—an album that is dreamy but laser-focused, steeped in nostalgic sounds but forward-looking, starry-eyed but sophisticated.
A quintet that met in college at Yale (from which they recently graduated), Pavo Pavo exhibits a finely-tuned chemistry. Comprised of Eliza Bagg (violin, synth, and voice), Oliver Hill (guitar, synth, and voice), Nolan Green (guitars and voice), Austin Vaughn (drums), and Ian Romer (bass), they move gracefully between sounds and genres, sometimes leading with bouncing bass lines for disco-infused pop, other times wandering through the complex reveries of art rock or psych-pop. Maybe because of the melding voices and influences of its five members, Pavo Pavo occasionally resembles Grizzly Bear (“Annie Hall,” “2020, We’ll Have Nothing Going On”), Fleet Foxes or M. Ward (“Somewhere in Iowa”), and St. Vincent at her softest (“The Aquarium”), but they always sound lush, warm, and colored by the sepia haze of ‘70s rock the sunny tones of Beach Boys pop.
In addition to blending influences, Young Narrator in the Breakers also merges themes and allusions. In the tradition of other bands with elite college origins (think Vampire Weekend), Pavo Pavo embeds their music with cultural references, real and imagined. None of them are exclusionary, though; the band uses literary language not as a musical crossword puzzle, but as evocative imagery. The album title, calling to mind the name of a collection of lyrical poetry, evokes a lone figure facing the expansive sea; “A Quiet Time with Spaceman Putz,” the name of the spacey all-instrumental interlude, brings to mind a character in a David Bowie song or Stanley Kubrick movie, but is fictional as far as my Google search revealed; and “Annie Hall,” of course, is as iconic as they come. But far from a casual namedrop, Pavo Pavo is self-aware about its aspirations to mimic the Woody Allen film (“Kick it to the right / Like Annie Hall / In 1975”). Most people who move to New York have those same daydreams.
Through Young Narrator in the Breakers, Pavo Pavo makes gorgeous musical landscapes out of similar daydreams, capturing the post-college fear and hopefulness that comes from facing a new city, particularly one as unconquerable as New York. It’s a gorgeous, elegant debut—and proof that it’s possible to carve out some space, even there.