As the cliché goes, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. We as humans are not our biochemistry, a maze of neurons or our limbs. In art, the gestalt is the ultimate goal, the pinnacle of artistic vision. Pit Er Pat's latest release sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. At times truly endearing and mature, and at others hypnotically tiresome, The Flexible Entertainer fails to appropriately coagulate into any sort of discernable whole.
In their defense, Pit Er Pat have always been a band of inconvenient circumstances, but in the past, this was their strength. They formed spontaneously after prior engagements with other musicians fell through, and anything they produced had an organic quality to it, as if it were forged through natural processes of seismic proportions. Now, this atmosphere has worn off, the mountains are no longer moving and we catch Pit Er Pat in an act of contentedness.
This isn't to say that the entire experience that is The Flexible Entertainer is worthless, but the recurring weakness of the album emerges rather conspicuously after a promising beginning. ""Intro"" comes to a rolling boil before finally reaching its apex, pouring over into the quizzically placed ""Water.""
""Water"" is an exercise in trip-hop drivel, complete with inane idiosyncrasies and GarageBand-quality effects. ""Drip drip drip,"" sings Fay Davis-Jeffers with an off-putting arrogance, a tone that is neither expected nor appreciated. The lyrics ""Tic tic toc"" are meant to mimic the inevitability of time marching away. Though it presents us with a moderately interesting philosophical dilemma—that of wasting away—the song does not provide us with the framework with which to push it forward or to evolve beyond a blanket statement. As listeners we are stranded, haunted by the band's need to mystify us through the stretching of familiar sounds until they become disorienting, horrible nightmares. And that's when we realize that the album is just a bunch of parts, isolated from everything else that Pit Er Pat have to offer.
This pattern continues for a little over 40 minutes. We are constantly presented with interesting ideas and even more interesting sonic landscapes (a skill for which Pit Er Pat show a special adeptness), but they never seem to fit themselves into anything that is substantial. They almost actively resist any sort of conjunction.
""Nightroom"" and ""Godspot"" reach out through the amorphous paradigm, providing us with a center to gravitate around. ""Nightroom"" is exactly what Pit Er Pat do best; the esoteric harmonies send mixed signals as the guitars weave through the synthesizers, the drums filling the holes with powerful triplets and subtle cymbals. Even the lyrics here are more poignant with Davis-Jeffers finding a new urgency with which to sing, ""Sleep in your cave and dream of me / as I was.""
""Godspot"" keeps up this newfound momentum, relying heavily on a piecemeal guitar that seems to grow but never changes. Davis-Jeffers' voice has an otherworldly quality that sounds more like speaking in tongues than angelic, and the atmosphere really begins to take hold here. But just as the record begins to make a cogent statement, ""Summer Rose"" derails it yet again. Where the guitars once sounded so certain, they now sound lost amidst the teen angst and faux-blues feel. This feeling is incessant and pervasive. Each moment of grandeur gets canceled out before any sort of realization can occur, oftentimes with rhythms that turn out to be more cataclysmic than they are intriguing. The mess compounds, as the album stretches itself out over the same exhausted motif, and we're left wondering where we started in the first place.
In the end, is this a problem? If an album cannot stand as a single entity, does that automatically mean that the individual parts can't have lives of their own? Well, of course they can stand on their own, and they do here to a fault.
The Flexible Entertainer is an album with an especially dynamic quality. Its peaks are few, but they exert a force over the listener. So we listen again, just to make sure we didn't miss a peak tucked behind an errantly placed crash cymbal or in the midst of an irksome synthesizer drone. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is nothing hidden under the tape hiss but mismatched parts and vapidity.
