On the same October day Pinkish Black released their third and best LP to date through Relapse Records, the label also issued the final recordings of the members' earlier act, a process stalled for five years by tragedy. Pinkish Black's anchors—the theatric singer and florid keyboardist Daron Beck and athletic drummer Jon Teague—formed The Great Tyrant a decade ago with bassist Tommy Atkins. A young, exploratory and vaguely metallic outfit interested in doom and goth, industrial and krautrock, The Great Tyrant was working on The Trouble with Being Born when Atkins killed himself in 2010. Beck and Teague scrapped the sessions and started a new band, taking the color of the blood-splattered walls where Atkins had died—that is, pinkish-black—as a lurid tribute to the missing member. It's fitting, then, that The Great Tyrant emptied its archives on the same day Pinkish Black offered its latest, greatest work to date, Bottom of the Morning. As a duo, Beck and Teague have finally found the sound and strength for which they've long searched. Fighting through a half-decade of despair, the results on Bottom of the Morning almost feel heroic.
Pinkish Black's previous two albums were hesitant and uncertain, as though Teague and Beck were trying to define their shared aesthetic while teasing out a new duo chemistry, too. Their fine 2012 debut packed in some excellent ideas and alluring sounds, but the band—particularly Teague's voice—was obscured in effects. Though more forthright, the subsequent Razed to the Ground found the duo again trying to do too much, as they moved from slow-motion dirges to extravagant, pulse-pounding doom.
But Bottom of the Morning is, at last, the first unified, unabashed Pinkish Black album. These songs are unveiled, a message that's as clear with the hook-heavy, march-like opener "Brown Rainbow" as it is with the beautifully brutal instrumental closer "The Master is Away". On these seven tracks, Beck and Teague amplify the grandiosity, directness and intensity of what they do. The keyboards can be as rich as a Tangerine Dream or Goblin record, the melodies as creepy and contagious as John Carpenter. And Teague emerges as a powerhouse capable of summoning John Bonham, Klaus Dinger and Billy Cobham. But the real coup here comes through Beck's voice. Even on The Great Tyrant's LPs, especially the now-unearthed The Trouble with Being Born, it was clear how capable he was, though he wasn't yet quite in command of his talent. Here, however, his mix of near-monastic chants, witchy incantations and operatic verses—now, not crowded by manipulation or undercut with noise—serves as the record's compulsory core. You lean in close to hear what he's saying.
It should come as little surprise that a band named for a friend's suicide embraces dark lyrics. Indeed, these songs approach the nihilistic. "Special Dark" is little more than a string of negative participles and adjectives—"withered, fractured … bleaker, starker"—intoned in a dour murmur over blown-out bass and busy drums. At the start of "Bottom of the Morning", Beck whispers and sings about wasting life and wasting time; at track's end, he howls about endless cycles of false promises and futile attempts at self-improvement. "Everyday's the same again," he sings, his voice stentorian but graceful, like a latter-day Scott Walker. "Everyday it's growing thin." Since Atkins' death in 2010, they've survived the death of several family members and severe sickness; the weight and worry of the world are central to these songs.
But somehow, those qualities are boons, not burdens. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests. The album itself is triumphant, like a survivalist manifesto offered at the close of a markedly tough spell. Behind the grim declarations of "Bottom of the Morning", for instance, the twinkle of the organ, the groove of the left hand's bassline and the dance of the drums suggest Miles Davis' On the Corner, perhaps even Weather Report. And though "Burn My Body" is as lyrically macabre as the title implies, bright synthesizer arpeggios and the back-and-forth motion of the drums offer the relief and release endemic to the narrator's final request. As the song ends, the synthesizers and drums intimate a skyward ascension, a last will finally honored. On Bottom of the Morning, Beck and Teague have effectively stepped beyond the ghosts of the past, landing in a present where the results are now as compelling as the backstory.
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