album review: pets with pets, saturday aquatic pixie acid

With an album title quite as spectacular as that, you wouldn’t really know what to expect, except for something bordering the weird and wonderful. Pets With Pets (Viscount Zayd Thring and Jonox Edmonds) are the eclectic Melbourne duo behind the six-track Krautrock/post-punk debut album that was named after a combination of song titles. You can tell these guys thought about music, structure, conventionality, etc. and chewed it up, spat it, put acid in everyone’s bourbon and said ‘hey kids, let’s play some tunes’.

So they did, a little eccentrically. It’s a bit of a musical black hole; you get sucked in and churned out, so let’s call this album an experience.

It kicks off with a 15-minute head-shaker called ‘Saturday I Died’. It ties in drums and guitar, with yappity-yaps and inconsistent harmonies that fall apart halfway through, only to pick up with a drone like quality. The drone continues on into next track, ‘Aquatic Life’, which is probably the only song on the whole album that seems musical; there is a clear structure, but they stay true to their oddity by incorporating chanting vocals and all-round intrigue. ‘House Wolf’ is a 1:15 minute long hazy cloud, sort of the song you would play in your head if the person you were talking to suddenly exploded into a cloud of glitter. ‘Pixie Child’ is probably my favorite, and not just for the name. With its rolling drum beat, and striking vocals, mixed with fading synth, it’s in and out and well, pixie-ish. ‘Whalevolcano’ is entirely instrumental, and the ticking clock gets in your head, making the song catchy. The closing track, ‘Acid Girls Make the Best…’ (what? WHAT?!) is full of their preferred animal yelps, but enlists an element of creepy. I immediately think of every dark and twisty forest party scene, where people hallucinate and someone dies in an elaborately gory fashion. You know the kind. Or of the walking scene at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs. That’s a very, very good thing.

The theme throughout the whole album would probably be distortion, but not the tacky, overdone distortion-plus-reverb combination that is just popping out of the woodwork these days. It’s raw but not grating, involved but not over-complicated. It is the spawn of countless long nights of experimentation, and excellent headphones. It leaves an impression. As every good/bad/weird experience does.