The cover of PC Worship’s Basement Hysteria features concentric circles. They appear to be in motion, rippled by an unseen hand. The imagery evokes Peter Saville’s iconic cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, another picture of linear stability disrupted. For the New York ensemble PC Worship — led by Justin Frye, who’s credited with the cover art — the uncannily destabilized image aptly introduces a full-length fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. Instead, Basement Hysteria restates riffs until listeners reach a dissociative threshold, a kind of aural vertigo.
If that sounds something like a tenet of minimalist composition, it’s no coincidence. The members of PC Worship seem like self-taught students of…
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…20th-century avant-garde. The shifting lineup, which Frye has helmed since the late 2000s, incorporates circuit bending, tape manipulation, harsh noise, and field recordings. Their songs do not sound intended for replication. There’s too much improvisation, especially in the braying brass caterwaul, and the home recordings welcome environmental intrusions. And yet, last year’s Social Rust indicated a subtle departure. Still saturated with queasy dissonance, its songs hewed closer to conventional lengths and structures. PC Worship’s latest, however, makes no such concessions.
Basement Hysteria features four songs at over a half hour. The ostensible single, in so far as it was posted ahead of the release date, exceeds 13 minutes. Vital signs like that register less like an album or an EP and more like a statement: If Social Rust flirted with the common indie rock narrative about experimentalism capitulating to accessibility then Basement Hysteria is a harsh rebuff. It’s bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. Here, rock’n’roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom.
Indeed, Basement Hysteria begins with a song called “Done”. It’s easy to mistake the horns for a wailing baby. Some pundit babbles on a muddled radio or television. Piano — a detuned, unenthused clang — serves as the dreary pulse of this urban soundscape, but the rest of the album takes place underground. “Where am I/ Where am I/ I’m in my head when I should be outside,” Frye groans later in the song, his delivery by that time a weary echo of the sluggish drumbeat. The title track, perhaps the only rudderless inclusion, sounds like little more than one-handed drumming and tuning peg abuse. On “Social Fiction”, however, PC Worship compellingly recalls tour-mates Naomi Punk; both bands know the value of a slow, syncopated pummel. Only, Frye’s group textures leaden might with total scree.
The tracks conclude unceremoniously, with a coughing fit, or protracted instrumental decay. Resolution is for pop, or songs intended for an audience; part of Basement Hysteria’s appeal is an illusion: listeners are among the privileged few who get invited deep down below. And it’s convincing. A centerpiece of sorts, “My Lens” is a procession of seemingly discrete sections. High tones wail siren-like before a morose, spare passage of acoustic guitar and murmured poetics. It best conveys the simmering mania of Basement Hysteria, where obsession induces befuddlement and simple things grow unnatural features under prolonged examination.