Send "Three Mile Pilot " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Back in the music industry's Roaring 90s, labels indulged in two particular types of spending sprees that were often related: trying to locate the "next Seattle" and forking over lucrative record contracts to bands with heaps of alt cachet but almost no commercial prospects. Which explains how San Diego's Three Mile Pilot scored a deal with Geffen that lasted about as long as it will take to read this review. Now, Three Mile Pilot return after more than a decade of silence with The Inevitable Past Is the Future Forgotten. In the time since, 3MP's Pall Jenkins and Armistead Burwell Smith IV have kept busy-- Jenkins helmed the Black Heart Procession's brooding noir-rock over the span of six studio albums, while Smith co-founded Pinback with Rob Crow.If you became familiar with the BHP and Pinback in the 2000s, it won't be a surprise about what 3MP sound like: Jenkins' voice is central and can expand like an accordion in terms of range and timbre. The instrumental construction is not far removed from recent Pinback, favoring clean, surgical guitars that prod and slice with precision and a production ethic that's as arid and frigid as the desert at night. While listeners more inured to the frillier, more electronic-based current iteration of indie might find 3MP somewhat repetitive (a valid complaint during Side B's slower numbers), there's a crucial motion that defines their interplay: With minimal accoutrement, every element feels like an interlocking gear pushing things forward. When they work in relatively high BPMs ("Same Mistake", "Left in Vain"), hooks tumble over each other. It's almost Krautrock-like in its mesmeric build....full text |
| Potholesinmyblog |
| San Diego has a knack for turning out some really cathartic music, doesn’t it? For a couple of decades (if not longer), the city has been practically bubbling over with some of the most angst-ridden musicians. Of course, there’s Three Mile Pilot and their sister band, The Black Heart Procession, but there’s also the whole San Diego-based Gravity Records family that provided an outlet for bands like Antioch Arrow—bands that practically made a career out of catharsis. All of these bands might as well have hailed from the same doom-and-gloom, rainy Seattle scene that gave birth to grunge, but they’re from a place so uncharacteristic that you begin to reconsider the notion that geography and climate tend to engender a band’s sound. Regardless of their true geographical placement, there’s no doubt that Three Mile Pilot have the uncanny ability to transfer you to a place that’s never sunny, nor coastal. They offer a far more desolate, desertlike soundscape. It’s that autumnal sonic trademark that has haunted their albums since the early-to-mid ‘90s, and it’s still present on their out-of-nowhere, first full-length album in over 13 years, The Inevitable Past Is The Future Forgotten. After spending years apart and developing their songwriting talent on the sidelines with The Black Heart Procession and other acts, such as Pinback, the band reunited to form a better, bolder version of their younger selves. Thirteen years later, the songwriting has returned more sharpened and focused. There’s less catharsis and angst, but emotional sincerity remains. They’re strangely upbeat on “Same Mistake”, which is piano-and-simple-guitar-hook driven. Subtle, buzzy keyboards occasionally peek in as the vocals make a grand entrance and declare, “This cold weather is chilling my bones,” as if the narrator were coming inside after a long walk on a cold November day. It seems like there’s a juxtaposition of jollity against bleakness. But don’t let the faster tempo fool you—the haunting, echoing vocal treatment makes it clear that there’s not much contentment to be had. This album’s quite the downer, huh?...full text |
| Popmatters |
| This is a welcome return from Three Mile Pilot, a band whose main members Pall Jenkins and Armistead Burwell Smith IV were placed on hiatus in 1998 to form the Black Heart Procession and Pinback. And while those bands keep producing albums of high quality, their high points of Amore Del Tropico (2002) and Blue Screen Life (2001) now seem some way behind them. And that’s what makes The Inevitable Past is Forgotten such an exciting release. It’s an album which marks a major stylistic change—earlier Three Mile Pilot, Black Heart Procession and Pinback music had always been so hard to classify. Here, the prominent use of keyboards and the anthemic nature of many of the songs give the whole project an ‘80s feel, with glimpses of The Cure (on “Still Alive”), Public Image Ltd (“Days of Wrath”) or Killing Joke (“What’s in the Air”). In some ways, this is not an album as edgy as you’d may be expecting, but with broader appeal. The melodies that are normally crammed into every Pinback album are present, and allied to Pall Jenkins’ plaintive, unearthly whine, they work wonders. Lyrically, the themes are universal, covering such areas as regret (“Same Mistake”), losing time (“Left in Vain”) and escape (“Still Alive”). It’s in the music and vocal harmonies that the surprises are dealt out, the contrast between Jenkins, shifting between baritone and falsetto, and the more melodic Smith meld into each other in perfect union. The music builds from different sources throughout the album, with bass taking the stage on “The Threshold”, Gang of Four post-punk guitars on “One Falls Away”, and running piano on “Same Mistake”, the one track that could easily become something of a hit. It’s certainly as taut and ostentatious as anything by The Walkmen or The National. It’s on “What’s in the Air” that we get the Killing Joke reference, a pulsating, distorted bass line evolves through vocals, guitar and synth into a deathly, otherworldly refrains of “what’s in the air we breathe?” The album finishes on “The Premonition,” a ballad that could have easily come from the Flaming Lips, while also sounding like Harry Nilsson in a very dark mood, Popeye at the bottom of a barrel. It’s another twist on their sound, making it hard to believe that this band hasn’t recorded for over 10 years....full text |
Three Mile Pilot lyrics
|
| |||||||
