Spectreview: peaer – A Healthy Earth

-WITCH HAZE-

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peaer’s new album, A Healthy Earth, is a record that feels like it lives and breathes on its own time, unaware (or uncaring) of anybody listening. Its songs are so tonally realized, its body so solidly arranged, that listening to it often feels like it transcends its creators and becomes its own player. That’s quite a feat for a band that operates in the boundaries of math-rock, where the focus is usually on the technicality of each individual performance than on any cohesive assembly. That virtuosity makes itself present, like on the rocketing solo closing the otherwise pensive “Like You,” but it’s the all-around tightness of the band that helps creates that apparent sentience: “In My Belly” rises and then falls in tempo like a period of wakefulness in a hibernating animal, while “Don’t” hits several levels of volume, blasting out as if at random. Each song is its own biome that also links to the album’s overarching theme’s of contemporary anxieties, which are tackled inventively in the mundanities of the waiting room of “Commercial” and the creeping paranoia of “Joke.” Throughout, the band hits you at unguarded angles, running through the plaintive balladry of “Wilbur” and “Ollie,” and dowsing you in the tender slowcore of “Multiverse” like Teenage Fanclub on quaaludes. What’s most striking is how each instrument, especially Peter Katz’ inviting vocals, range wildly from the edge of audible to a full-on assault, and always when the song calls for that dynamic. It’s one of the many reasons why A Healthy Earth feels so alive, and why its a resounding success.

Recommended for walking in a circle.