Anger channeled in the right way on Pit Pony’s debut album.
For those of you not up on your industrial revolution, a pit pony was a horse bred to work mostly underground in the 19th and 20th century coal mines that pockmarked much of Britain.
As much as anywhere they were a common sight in the pits of Tyneside, the location from where this quintet named the same are based although, along with most other working class means of earning a living, mineral extraction has long since disappeared from the region’s social fabric.
With this legacy it’s unsurprisingly a tough area, one seemingly in the grip of a backlash against a more revolutionary past but, although the quintet’s music is visceral and abrasive, they spend their debut album not judging how things used to be.
For singer Jackie Purver and co, instead the impression is that right and left-wing pissing competitions are anathema, the group’s songs handling topics such as mental health, motherhood and failed relationships.
On the way they’ve had some welcome help too; after a clutch of singles and pandemic delays, World To Me comes after they were leant support from the PRS Foundation and Help Musicians. Their investment was worth it.
Opener Tide Of Doubt falls on the listener like a punk-drunk ton of bricks, a guitar thrash over which Purver coolly skewers her little spot in the country’s post-Covid SNAFU with: ‘I get to thinking/I get to overthinking/And soon I’m slipping off the rails.’ Sadly we’ve all been there, it just hasn’t sounded this good.
The last thing we need though, you could say, is more misdirected brawn over brain, and at that constant tempo brains would be mush. And whilst that might be a good thing at the moment, let’s not.
Wisely, the title-track takes some of the heat out, a spidery ballad about love and belonging whilst See Me Be deals with the colossal weight of becoming a mother in a time where uncertainty is the only constant.
If that isn’t cause enough to face down the things which can’t be avoided, the notion of anxiety manifesting itself as the Penrose Stairs stalks Black Tar, a beetling slab of buzz core that deliberately runs at the same foot tappin’ ramalama throughout, the road ahead an ‘icy incline’, a snakes and ladders board without the fucking ladders.
Music as a thought process always backs this psychological maze up, thankfully. Supermarket turns back inward and rumbles with bass fuzz, post-shoegaze guilt and the threat of mutually assured emotional destruction: ‘But where we left it/Oh we left our sorries/And I just pushed you aside.’
This is not a place full of easy answers, answers, or anything easy, but the good news is that there’s always a razor wired guitar riff to put your shades on to in the dead of night, as if they come from some Geordie stockpile made up from the offcuts Blondie and Bikini Kill left behind the last time they went looking for the grave of Jack Carter.
A maze of hard means Just That can thrash like Whitley Bay riot grrrl, whilst closer Profit gets bigger as it goes, sounding like a jab first at the men who run the country (into the ground) but ends up just throwing stones off a needing gone too far.
In the monochrome past a pit pony was used until it was spent, then taken out and killed. World To Me sounds like it’s in the mood to do some of that right back; it’s a beast alright, but not of burden.
