Konkord 136
Assemblages
Pyhrà
Destroy what destroys you! Discuss what is breaking you! Before something breaks you, zap yourself to sleep. Honey in the yogurt, darling?
With their current album Assemblages, the duo PYHRÀ is writing the soundtrack for the time after the revolutions. Florian (Husbert) Huber: vocals, guitar, bass, programming, and Kathrin Huber: vocals, accordion. There is no sophisticated sound that characterizes the character of the album. PYHRÀ prefer to polish their rough diamonds a little and make the listener sparkle. Sophisticated understatement as an artistic guide: DIY culture rules!
And like a declaration of war on the fat rings of meaning, Pyhra as a location can be found several times on the Austrian map. A little town, a village or just a block of streets - but always far away from the hotspots, the places-to-be, the centers of the must-go. The album title matches these markers. In addition to collage as an art technique, the blend of several wines is also called assemblage. The sparkle of meaning is part of the program.
The calmness keeps the tension and it is precisely this wide arc around the shrill themes and tones that creates the charm of Assemblages' songs, which are balanced down to the essentials. A rocking guitar riff in “You were right and I was wrong” - the anthem for everyone who is fed up with skirmishes of opinion – flows into a glockenspiel melody. Or how in the song “Towels” a casually laid-back drum set, which is always slightly hasty, meets the storytellers, who hesitate, listen to the beat, but pick up the thread again and weave an accordion melody into the melancholic chorale.
PYHRÀ's thing is not to slap a lot of paint onto the canvas with a fully soaked brush. Bono has to wait outside. It's not for nothing that the album begins with the mysterious "Nix": a child tells a story in a loop in an incomprehensible language that no one understands. But nothing is just the beginning. And anyone who makes music on the countryside has to go so much further. Maybe as far as Paris around 1900 to Georges Seurat. Point. Point. Point. Carefully placed – in exactly the right place.
The path that Florian Huber has taken through the indie rock of VALINA and the reduced sound of MY HOUSE IN SPAIN lies in simplifying, clearing out, eliminating. In between, it’s about positions that allow Assemblages by PYHRÀ to breathe and thus keep them alive. “Time Is A Merciless Machine.”
Five steps back and the album presents itself as a portrait of a time in which upholstery battles are intended to cover up the great discomfort (“Sunday Kitchen Stories”). Weddings end in catastrophes (“Uniformity”), well-intentioned parenting concepts are only successful if they are ignored (“Spring”), impostors fly low (“Der Ueberflieger”).
Assemblages is an echo sounder for troubled times disguised as a music album.