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$PVT - ‘CHURCH WITH NO MAGIC’Published: The Big Issue #361, August 2010. Church With No MagicPVT**** PVT are a band with an extraordinary sense of focus. The Sydney and Perth-raised trio’s career – which has survived numerous line-up shifts and a recent name change from Pivot, following a legal challenge from a US band of the same name – has been marked by the unswerving refinement and synthesis of ideas. New album Church With No Magic is the realisation of a long line of gestures, interests, direction and experiments. It is the Pivot sound, only condensed, reduced and honed. Indeed, where 2005 debut Make Me Love You partook in an agile expansion of postrock and jazz, and 2008 follow-up O Soundtrack My Heart stripped their aesthetic down to a kind of a punchy, loose take on electronica and krautrock, Church With No Magic rids whole chunks of the PVT sound; namely guitars. It’s an exhilarating, electrifying shift. Buzzing swarms of synths and arcing, reverb-laced vocals (courtesy of Richard Pike) dominate; tracks are economised to key tonal and melodic elements and layers. Laurence Pike’s hammering drums ring out like gunshots; Dave Miller’s electronic negotiations fracture and reconstruct melodies and rhythmic structures at whim. The loss of PVT’s vowels has come with the cutting of dead wood. Dan Rule$

PVT - ‘CHURCH WITH NO MAGIC’
Published: The Big Issue #361, August 2010.

Church With No Magic
PVT
****

PVT are a band with an extraordinary sense of focus. The Sydney and Perth-raised trio’s career – which has survived numerous line-up shifts and a recent name change from Pivot, following a legal challenge from a US band of the same name – has been marked by the unswerving refinement and synthesis of ideas.

New album Church With No Magic is the realisation of a long line of gestures, interests, direction and experiments. It is the Pivot sound, only condensed, reduced and honed.

Indeed, where 2005 debut Make Me Love You partook in an agile expansion of postrock and jazz, and 2008 follow-up O Soundtrack My Heart stripped their aesthetic down to a kind of a punchy, loose take on electronica and krautrock, Church With No Magic rids whole chunks of the PVT sound; namely guitars. It’s an exhilarating, electrifying shift.

Buzzing swarms of synths and arcing, reverb-laced vocals (courtesy of Richard Pike) dominate; tracks are economised to key tonal and melodic elements and layers. Laurence Pike’s hammering drums ring out like gunshots; Dave Miller’s electronic negotiations fracture and reconstruct melodies and rhythmic structures at whim.

The loss of PVT’s vowels has come with the cutting of dead wood.

Dan Rule

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