Spectreview: Panchiko – D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L

Curio from the year 2000 or viral contemporary indie hit? Decide for yourself in the nostalgic emoscapes of these reissued EPs from mysterious Nottingham band Panchiko.

-LIGHT GREEN-

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“Have I been cut again?
Just to dust
Sweet descent my friend”

I’m a cynic. It happens when you grow up with the Internet. It also happens when you grow up in general, but I digress. The young, naïve spirit in me that begs to believe there was actually an EP called D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L released in 2000 (on exactly one CD, to exactly one record store in Nottingham, U.K) is fighting with my adult inclination that viral marketing campaigns for new music can very realistically reach this absurd level in 2020. I can say for certain that, even just walking into Singles Going Steady down in Belltown, I’ve come across tons of CDs that for sure have never been played before, but that’s exactly the kind of reasonable doubt that some enterprising artists could take advantage of.

So let’s put aside all of the mythos that has somehow brought this record to a newfound prominence and talk about if it matters whether or not it’s all real. Considering how the gulf between artist and audience has widened since music went online, people really don’t need to know anything about who’s doing the art to enjoy it to its fullest potential. If anything, it actually helps to provide a peculiar sense of personal ownership, as if the listener can take full claim to their discovery. Then again, this is not the case for Panchiko, a band who, regardless of the veracity of its story, has built up a small but dedicated community of people via Discord and message boards. Truth or fiction, it’s a situation that any underground artist would dream for; a cult fanbase that’s willing to support your music to its logical endpoint.

It’s this support that’s led to this recent release, an album-length retrospective that contains completely remastered versions of both Panchiko EPs with a inclusion of the disc-rotted version that first caught attention back in 2017. Assuming this was indeed an effort from twenty years ago (an assumption we’ll gently continue to assert for the rest of this article) it’s pleasure enough to remind ourselves of where alternative music was in that era, just before the first inklings of an indie movement were rising the western world.

The songs lean suggestively into emo territory and are largely atmosphere-based, as if they were logical extensions of where the shoegaze movement petered out of the public eye in 1997. Additional sampling and drum programming also lend a trip-hop sensibility, most notably on the art-rock opus “Kicking Cars” and on the resplendent title track, which lays down modified synth pads and chopped children’s programming on top of a tender guitar line and a ghost-noted drum pattern. There are obvious nods to Radiohead’s late-90’s imperial period on “Sodium Chloride” and “Kicking Cars,” along with a strange dream-pop/industrial mash-up in “Stabilizers for Bad Boys” and room for a seven-minute foray into psychedelia on “The Eyes of Ibad.” Considering the stylistic variance, it’s fascinating how many of these tracks seem to fit within the current landscape of underground music, which says perhaps as much about the cycling of trends than about the band’s ability to communicate in forward-thinking terms.

The original “disc-rotted” songs supply another distinct pleasure in how they inadvertently mesh noise with pop songwriting. Comparing each of them with their uncorrupted counterpart is a fun exercise, but it’s maybe not as important as experiencing them on their own terms, allowing yourself to adjust to the noise and letting the strangeness wash over you. Playing devil’s advocate, it would be easy enough for Panchiko to meticulously apply distortion and bitcrushing to each of these tracks in a way that resembles real disc-rot, but in that case it would still be a impressive feat considering how the choppiness replaces sonic clarity with an unplaceable otherworldliness. The effect of that context is manifold, with each song blossoming into an intriguing experimental piece quite unlike anything else in its wheelhouse.

Call it post-nostalgia, call it lostwave, call it canny manipulation: D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L nonetheless succeeds on very current terms, drawing up a series of memories you’ve likely never experienced.

Recommended for shiny bedroom posters and spending hours on Limewire.