ALBUM REVIEW: Hard Return – Pill Super
PILL SUPER – also known as Caden Marchese – is a project inspired by Marchese‘s move from Denver, Colorado to New York City. Before the move, he had become a familiar face in the Denver DIY scene, often working on the engineering side of music, as well as playing in several bands and collaborating with the likes of MIDWIFE and AMERICAN GRANDMA. His new album Hard Return swaps out the wide-open studios that he used to record in for a focus on archived ideas, and with Marchese alone at the controls this time around he has had the freedom to create a personal and more nuanced sound.
The result is an album of intimacy. Across nine songs (two of which are remixes), PILL SUPER‘s lo-fi electronic music sounds like it could easily soundtrack a 2010s indie movie. Take the opening song, Wind Rails, as one such example. The drums that are interspersed in the mid-tempo electronic sound mix in well together, and the track feels eerie and somewhat mystical, as if it is from outer space. It is extremely relaxing. However, the only issue is that it is rather one note, which does make the four-and-a-half-minute runtime rather tedious. There are some elements added later that try to make it interesting, such as a bass-heavy rumbling sound during the last minute of the song, but it does sound like it was tacked on at the end and not needed.
Thankfully, Your Hydra livens things up a bit by being a dance anthem that could be played at clubs, and Siah, with its bass-heavy beat and eerie electronics is essentially the love child of the first two songs. For those who like experimentation and more ambient electronic music, there is a lot to like on this album, including some unique vocal recordings that have been spliced in. However, if you aren’t too big of a fan of that, then this album could prove to be rather tiresome, especially as there are a lot of songs that do sound very similar. Furthermore, the tracks get longer as the album goes on, and therefore the pacing of the album is extremely slow and does start to drag. This is a shame because if you give it time there are some interesting parts to listen to, such as the two remixes at the end which speed things up, although even these do jar a little bit with the slower pace of the rest of the record.
Ultimately, Hard Return is a peculiar album. On the one hand, it is a unique electronic album that does its own thing, and isn’t afraid to be bold and experimental. On the other hand, the pacing is very slow up until the last two songs, then it becomes really fast and that makes the album feel quite chaotic by the end. Furthermore, the songs can be rather repetitive at times, and the experimentation can be subtle to hear, which may also be frustrating to those less excited by the more ambient side of music like this. Whilst PILL SUPER is clearly at ease with the music, and there are some brilliant songs here and there, this album does feel a bit like leftovers from archived files.
Raring: 5/10
Hard Return is out now via Nine Of Swords.
Follow PILL SUPER on Bandcamp.