Envisaged and executed quite explicitly as an album, its narrative plotted, worked at and painstakingly built to achieve the desired moods and textures, Echo Ono would seem to constitute Pontiak’s most crafted album to date. Having decided to create a “colour project, painted through music”, the band went to great lengths to realise this auditory vision, even deconstructing, re-equipping and reassembling their studio so that they could capture the music in precisely the desired manner.

At first, the resultant album appears to see a return to the band’s loudest, most noise-inflected origins.  ‘Lions of Least’ screeches into view positively brandishing  its heavy metal iron-on patches on its (denim, cut off) sleeves, with leonine pomp and a classic, sledgehammer riff.  Riffs are important, impressive and assertive, too, on ‘The North Coast’, ‘Left With Lights’, and then again towards the album’s end on the final two track ‘Royal Colors’ and ‘Panoptica’.  This being Pontiak, though, even at these heaviest moments there are always subtleties to be found – a lightness or deft switch in texture or mood, a silence or softness as counterpoint to the sturm und drang.  ‘The North Coast’ follows on from ‘Lions of Least’, and feels like its photo negative: subdued and nuanced, the contrasting intervals now being provided by the heavy segments, rather than the light.  The vocal here, and also on other tracks – ‘The Expanding Sky’ in particular – adds another layer of texture, with its chilled-out West Coast sound, reminiscent of CSNY, or even, at times, some of the more sensitive contemporary vocalists like Justin Vernon et al.  ‘Silver Shadow’, meanwhile, could be an offcut from Young’s Harvest Moon, from its “… moon is high and it keeps rising” lyricism to its vocals; the mellow pace only saved from collapsing into the completely sedentary by the song’s driving bass and dynamics.

As the album progresses, it can sometimes feel like an internal war is being waged – guitar sounds the battlefield – between The Riff and The Twang.  The latter begins to subsume the former from about the album’s middle, in ‘Across The Steppe’, where it combines with Zepplinesque tints of exoticism. ‘The Expanding Sky’ is perhaps the album’s finest riff-free moment: psychedelic, bucolic, laconic. ‘Stay Out, What A Sight’ starts with a red-herring buzz and rumble that slowly build, anticipating a dramatic climax that never arrives as the track instead develops into another one that can be chalked up for Team Twang, albeit at a fierce, galloping pace.

At its close is perhaps where Echo Ono‘s finest moment of all can be found. ‘Panoptica’ is an abstract thing of wonder, combining thrashy scattergun interplay between drum and guitar with narcotised, hallucinatory vibrations. Basses throb, rhythms and layers build and then recede, leaving nothing but the solid, steady drum beat which then too fades to nothing, leaving only the wisp of a shimmer of vibration at the album’s end.  It is a remarkable piece, and one which – like the rest of the album – provides no easy clues for those who like to categorise or pigeonhole music. In this Pontiak have once again thrown us a fascinating curveball.

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