Kelly Kirwan
The latest album from Boston’s purveyors of post-punk, Pile, stays true to their boisterous aesthetic. It’s bustling, as if it were recorded in an air compressor tank, the hint of implosion smirking at us throughout its nine tracks. A Hairshirt of Purpose is the band’s fifth LP in a ten-year span, and it’s speckled with elements of other unsuspecting genres.
While Pile has a tendency to gravitate towards a jarring, cut-and-paste style, there’s a certain fluidity to their latest work, a mingling of reflective grunge and full-fledged, noisy hysteria that has more than once been described as “cathartic” across the indie music boards. Frontman Rick Maguire (who handles vocals and supplements the guitars) had noted that A Hairshirt of Purpose grapples with the bliss of solitude, and rumor has it that the blueprint of this album came from his own independent excursion along the Appalachian Trail. The result is a kind of Walden-inspired enlightenment funneled through gritty instrumentals, zig-zagging chords, and fleeting, ruminative respites.
To begin, let’s take a cue from Pile and start with the unexpected: one of their slower songs. "No Bone" is a quick jaunt, with ever-so-slight elements of folk lurking in the twang of a guitar, and Maguire’s croon that lingers and curves at the end of each phrase. It’s an introspective song, unhurried and socially observant, “We can all pick fights and stay indoors / So there must be nothing here to tend to … But I’ll try to be kind,” he sings, as the track wraps at just under two minutes.
At the other end of the spectrum is “Texas,” where that aforementioned catharsis takes hold after reaching its boiling point. It begins with a boom, the slam of a drum as the guitars come reeling in, serpentine in their delivery. It’s full-bodied, and you feel as if you're shoulder-to-shoulder in a dimly-lit venue, knocking into your neighbors with sweat-caked skin and a feeling that any moment you may just break into a headbanging frenzy. “Texas” has no blank spaces, not a single crevice of quiet.
But even in Pile’s more subdued songs, they’re still filled to the brim. The album opener, "Worms," kicks off with a frenetic drumroll that then shifts into a contemplative song, with Maguire’s earnest voice at the forefront, “I would never dream of blaming it on you / So please don’t ask me to stay any longer,” his pitch spiking and falling over every word. That quick, stacked percussion of "Worms" is mirrored in the following song’s first seconds ("Hissing For Peace"), which maintains a heightened, reverb-laden cacophony throughout.
A Hairshirt of Purpose is a mosaic with sharp edges. Pieces of the album are reflective, even soft, and others have a taste for wildness that leads easily to a static-drenched revelry. It’s an all-encompassing trip for us to take, diving in to the album's ups and downs (decibel-wise, that is) for a feeling of sweet release.