Pictish Trail - Life Slime: Album Review

Artwork for the pictish trail album life of slime

4 stars hq

Running parallel to the mechanical part of the recording process was the melding of Johnny Lynch/Pictish Trail into less separate identities.

At first it’s easy to misread, as we’ve all done it.

By ‘it’ we mean binged on grunge, listening to In Utero at least three times in a row, or playing Mudhoney’s Touch Me, I’m Sick at the sort of volume which has the neighbours threatening to call the police.

But wait. This is in fact our bad, because in the background information which comes with his latest album, Johnny Lynch (AKA Pictish Trail) openly admits to, ‘Over the past few years watching ASMR videos of people making, touching, squelching and generally dismantling slime’, and that, ‘Friends have joked that these slime videos are “for perverts”’.

So not grunge, gunge. Life Slime. We get it now.

Lynch’s last full length record under the Pictish Trail moniker, Island Family, was released in 2022, but in the interim he hasn’t stood still; touring, working on side projects, curating a festival on the island of Eigg where he’s a part time resident.

It’s also, he admits, been a time of upheaval in his personal life, the writing process beginning in the midst a relationship breakup and then shifting perspective over time as he adjusted to newer feelings.

Once the material for Life Slime was ready the recording process took place at Mike Lindsay’s (of Tunng / LUMP) studio in Margate with Lindsay also playing, along with long time collaborators Rob Jones and Joe Cormack.

Running parallel to the mechanical part of the process was the melding of Johnny Lynch/Pictish Trail into less separate identities; although the album steps into the world as by the latter, the nature of its words and feelings are now almost indistinct with the former.

Part of this adopting and shedding of disguises was in the upfront use of auto tune, a method introduced straight away on the opener Hold It; with its rudimentary loops, gently strummed guitar and tweaked vocals, a song about realising that even the stray moments of perfection are by their nature unstable and likely to collapse.

Anybody thinking that the album’s title has not much beyond novelty value will though be forced to reconsider by Toxic Spillage/Battery Pack, the conjoined pair an instrumental starter before a weirder, electro-psychedelic main course.

Lynch maintains there’s, ‘Lots of sampled slime’, kicking about here, although it has to be said any sonic effect is a purely abstract one.

It would be easy to say something glib at this point about a songwriter not taking himself too seriously, but that’s clearly not the case.

Sorry Eyes for example fizzes between Animal Collective at their most accessible and something almost pop in its naivety.

Underneath however, the sentiment lies in the tit-for-tat, wounding exchanges that take place between people long after they’ve ceased to have purpose.

The hardest yards culminate in Torch Song, a ballad which stretches out the pain into something which can be rationalised only from the other side, the song’s within itself roll gradually disintegrating as the light finally glimmers out.

Although the precepts can feel cartoonish, the Life Slime’s best moments come with distance.

On the gauzy Infinity Ooze the idea of a connection surviving forever as another type of energy lifts, whilst closer Werewolf Ending gives the idea physical form, its sun dappled ambience meaning the shape can never be perceived in its mythical form, just as a gateway to transformation without fear.

Life Slime is an obviously curious idea, but one that is musically rendered in an ambitious, often playful way that Pictish Trail acolytes will have no trouble loving.

As for Johnny Lynch, gunge it seems will always be his friend.

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