ALBUM PREMIERE :: Dylan Pyles - "Evil Music For An Ugly World"

DYLAN PYLES - “EVIL MUSIC FOR AN UGLY WQRLD”

Premiered via Manor Records digitally Feb. 28nd 2020.

Cassette release March 20th/21st.

Songwriter Dylan Pyles’s fifth album release, Evil Music for an Ugly World, premiers February 28, 2020, in all its dark and impressive beauty. His first track, “The Fruit Is Growing Wild,” welcomingly opens the album as an instrumental piece. The classically-inspired, distorted guitar is crunchy, yet sweet, naturally preceding “Let It Rot.” Each song masters the art of brevity, accurately matching Pyles’s self-description: “Short songs written quickly.”

From start to finish, Evil Music for an Ugly World makes me want to slow dance with a cutie, while also simultaneously affirming my insecurities or hesitations in any romantic commitments. With non-traditional, poetic track titles, every tune flawlessly moves to the next, and at just the right listening tempo. Each guitar track places itself along the spectrum of surfy, to funky, to honky tonk--in the best way.

The album’s single, “New Orleans On the Day You Died,” brings twangy storytelling and fun melodic variation to the album’s overall mellow “ugly world” attitude. It easily shares “favorite song” status for me with the ninth track, “Please Be Quiet Please,” nostalgic of early 90s English rock (I’m a sucker for well-placed lyrical repetition and coarse cymbal crashes.)

Pyles delivers a relatable amount of existential dread in “Jackson Frank’s Good Eye,” with impenetrable guitars and clever lyrics. Just when I think his tones couldn’t get heavier, he subtly inserts a majestic solo rip in “Nothing at the Center,” for an overall well-balanced, guitar-centric album.

The final track, “I May Never Climb,” also notably instrumental, in tandem with “We Both Come Apart” at its midpoint, all carefully sandwich the entire album in a meaty Manor Records “Big Mac,” with three even slices of vox-free bread at the beginning, middle, and end. His sweet dynamic swells, perhaps pushing for an acceptance of hopelessness, skillfully follows “You Gave Me A Mountain.” Pyles’s overall calmness, sensitivity, and steady guitar licks will easily keep his newest material on heavy rotation in 2020.

CASSETTE RELEASE SHOWS BELOW

3/20 - Kansas City, MO @ Stray Cat Film Center

3/21 - Lawrence, KS @ Replay Lounge

* click on an event to RSVP

Review by ::

Alison Hawkins

Manor Blog Contributor, Kickball Captain, & member of True Lions.

Manor Records gives 100% of article author rights to Alison Hawkins.