It is tempting to read the title as a reference to Bazan’s return to his old moniker, but the reference is more overtly geographical than mythological. Bazan and his family left Phoenix, Arizona when he was twelve, and the album focuses its lens back on that time. The songs are intensely personal, the irony that abandoning a solo career to pick back up as a band has led to music more introspective than ever not lost on Bazan himself. “I didn’t realize what calling my music Pedro the Lion again would mean to me,” he says, “but it’s re-connected me to parts of myself and my history (both sonic and personal) that I had lost touch with.”

After the organ-like synths of the opening instrumental, ‘Yellow Bike’ opens with a modest and ordinary scene. “On a desert Christmas morning, 1981,” he sings, “one month shy of six years old, in the valley of the sun.” Though the simplicity belies gravity of the song, the first movement of a deep dive into childhood—an anguished but unflinchingly honest reckoning with the past in attempt to reconcile the present.

The song fuses the freedom of his first childhood bike ride with the lingering pain of isolation, feelings that can be extrapolated through to today, projections or self-inflicted fantasies that can come to define a life. A single taut guitar line backs the opening verse, a systolic drumbeat heralding the arrival of the full band, like a new dawn after years as a solo artist.

Placed in the context of a strict Christian upbringing, ‘Powerful Taboo’ plays as an child’s confused attempts to become themselves amidst a maze of barriers, dogmatic rules undermined by forces intrinsic and personal. The experience becomes one of guilt and shame, the middle ground where truths both religious and intimate are betrayed simultaneously in doomed effort to remain faithful to both. Such a predicament haunts ‘Circle K’ too, a tale of a childhood Bazan trying to collect enough pocket money for a Santa Cruz skateboard. The song is ostensibly unremarkable, but the writing and vocal delivery make the image of his child self spending his savings on candy and soda pops suddenly momentous, a harbinger of a thousand adult decisions.

Fittingly then, the salvation imagined on ‘Model Homes’ comes not via self-actualization or some higher power, but rather the offer of better living, a time where scrimping and saving in a lonely town is ended by the lottery of the American Dream. The isolation made clear on ‘Yellow Bike’ is ever-present, and the biggest draw of such a prize is the magnificent company that surely awaits its winners—suburbs as they appear in made-for-TV movies, full of friendly kids and fun adventures.

However the reality is different, and making friends requires compromise and self-deception. The title character of ‘Quietest Friend’ seems to be a part of Bazan himself, a part he kept hidden like Bukowski’s bluebird in an effort to connect with “fickle friends” since he was a child. “I didn’t see it coming but now it’s pretty clear,” he sings, “I traded my own wisdom for a jury of my peers. I ignored you for 30 years.” The accompanying video, directed and shot on 16mm film by Jason Lester, sees Bazan come face to face with this persona, quite literally.

‘Black Canyon’ uncoils slowly into a hard, flat rhythm, as sparse and unforgiving as the desert plains themselves. Based on family stories recalled from his childhood, the song details the aftermath of a road accident from the perspective of the men and women called to the scene. “My uncle Ray was a paramedic,” Bazan’s sings, “one of the first boots on the ground, he saw the man beneath the truck in several pieces, obviously gone.” The song echoes ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, displaying the same stunned realism in the face of sudden violence, beauty and the grotesque meeting in strange communion.

Such a juxtaposition lies at the heart of Phoenix. Childhood is remembered with intense dread and desperate fondness, a time to be blamed, pinpointed as the beginning of every adult hang-up and dead-end yet still somehow precious, even glorious. “My Phoenix still shines,” Bazan sings on ‘My Phoenix’, where the possessive ‘my’ highlights the track’s position. “My Phoenix will rise.” The idea extends to faith too, the cause of every destructive neurosis that still manages to command thought and awe, an idea hardwired into DNA, too deep for any rational writing off.

If the vision of the Christ
My family sees
Is my blurry vision’s greatest enemy

Then I still try to tune it in
When I get lonely
You know I chase around this desert because I think that’s where you’ll be

Closing track ‘Leaving the Valley’ finds the Bazan family crammed into a U-haul and moving on from Arizona, and, as is the way of things, the conclusion triggers affection. A perfect home it might not have been, but it was a home nonetheless, and nothing is more appealing to those destined or cursed to keep moving on. “How do you stop a rolling stone?” Bazan asks, “How will you know you’re finally home?”

The songs ends with a list of places and images from the desert, an incantation of pure nostalgia and also in many ways the recipe for the present day Bazan—the shaping influences, the unshakeable wishes, the things made forever sacred purely by happenstance. If Phoenix is, as Bazan says, “the result of mining your past for who you are now,” then listening to the record feels like spending a restless night at his side, watching as he examines a disparate series of scenes from his life, his origin story, projected onto the ceiling, the room cast in a wistful Super 8 glow.

Phoenix is out now on Polyvinyl Records. You can get it in a variety of formats from the Polyvinyl webstore or the Pedro the Lion Bandcamp page.

The post Pedro the Lion – Phoenix appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Various Small Flames’

Songs of 2017

Anamon – Kneel Old
Android Automatic – Dark Roads*
Angie McMahon – Slow Mover
Basement Revolver – Johnny Pt. 2
Baxter Roy Long – Paribanou
Bea Troxel – Let Them Know
Big Thief – Mary
Black Belt Eagle Scout – Soft Stud
Bully – Running
Cayetana – Mesa
Charly Bliss – Percolator
Chastity Belt – Different Now
CHUCK – Happy Birthday
The County Liners – Maria
The Courtneys – Tour
Craig Finn – God in Chicago
Crumb – Locket
Crushing – Emery Board
Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways
David Bazan – Care
Distant Reader – First Try
Emperor X – God Save Coastal Dorset
Fits – Ice Cream on a Nice Day
German Error Message – 2017*
Gleemer – Soothe Me
Great Grandpa – Favorite Show
Haley Heynderickx – Oom Sha Lala
Hiccup – Teasin’
Horse Culture – Texaco
Illuminati Hotties – ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever’
Japandroids – No Known Drink or Drug
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – If We Were Vampires
Jay Som – The Bus Song
Jeremy Squires – Night Cars
Katie Ellen – Drawing Room
Lizzie No – Monuments
Lomelda – Bam Sha Klam
Mike Pace and the Child Actors – Audits & Surveys
Meursault – The Mill
Mount Eerie – Crow
Nice Legs – Mighty Three
Oceanator – Nowhere Nothing
Ohyeahsumi – Daisy
Old Earth – Pit Dynamics
PASTEL – Stammer
Peter Silberman – New York
Phoebe Bridgers – Motion Sickness
Pope – Talk Me Out of It
Protomartyr – Windsor Hum
Rainwater – Place
Ratboys – Elvis is in the Freezer
Rick Rude – Bald & Fat in Houston, TX
Roadkill Ghost Choir – Classics (Die Young)
Rose Dorn – Dirt
See Through Dresses – Lucy’s Arm
Shannen Moser – A Funeral, A Friend, My Sanity
Sinai Vessel – Died On My Birthday
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Phoenix
SOAR – Fort Funston
Soft Fangs – Jordan // Jackson Elementary
Spartan Jet-Plex – We Believe
Strange Ranger – House Show
Strawberry Runners – Garden Hose
Timid, The Brave – Alice
Us and Only Us – Bored of Black
Vagabon – Cold Apartment
Viewfinder – Instant Moonlight
The Washboard Abs – Veil
Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong
Wild Pink – Albert Ross
William Ryan Fritch – In Our Blood
The Wooden Sky – Swimming in Strange Waters
Ylayali – Cherry Tomatoes

*Strictly released in 2016, but barely, and we covered it in Jan. 2017.

If you missed it, you can see our Favourite Albums of 2017 list here. Also, the curious can find such lists from previous years here.

The post Favourite Songs of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.