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| Pearly Gates |
Songs of Innocence and Experience
by Will Robinson Sheff
10.8.2000
Mulling over "angles" to begin this piece, I’ve decided to ditch them all and just start off by telling you that "Pearly Gates" is a fucking beautiful song. An unhurried, powerfully emotional seven and a half minutes, this song named after the band playing it shouldn’t work, should instead collapse into a muddle of melodramatic mush and over-the-top bombast. It doesn’t. Instead, it soars, the beautifully minimal bassline lifting shimmering guitar chords higher and higher, the string section strong enough to sustain not one but two powerful climaxes, as Sam Dietert’s full-throated, soulful shouts manage to be both totally dramatic and utterly fitting and true.
Mining similar teritory as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Swans (with occasional detours into Waitsian spoken-word, spacey samples, and old-fashioned country soul), and augmenting drums-bass-guitar with frequent string sections, apocalyptic church organ, and the occasional wavering keen of a theremin, Pearly Gates walks a razor-thin line between drama and bombast with considerable assurance and bravery, never rushing a song, never leaving an aural or lyric image anything less than fully realized. Dietert hides behind his beat-poet grumble and fragile moan the pipes of a real Rock and Roller, and when he lets loose, like he does during the wordless wail at the end of the band’s self-titled song, the effect is hair-raising.
"Singer Sam Dietert hides behind his beat-poet grumble and fragile moan the pipes of a real Rock and Roller, and when he lets loose the effect is hair-raising." |
Music today rarely comes so gothically theatrical: in their gracefully ominous "Dark River," with its list of drowned loved ones ticking off gradually to the protagonist, Pearly Gates bests even Tindersticks and lands somewhere (only slightly) beneath Nick Cave in terms of fatalistic grand guignol. Coming a few songs after such pitch-dark, burbling morbidity, "Pearly Gates" mad ascent towards heaven feels direly earned, and the aforementioned wail – a reaction to being "told I had to wait" – even more so.
Because they’re a band that Did It Themselves, Pearly Gates CDs may be hard to find outside of their home city of Austin, TX: copies of their debut are available easist through direct emailed requests. What’s surprising about said debut is that, while most DIY records are markedly Lo-Fi, the hi-gloss production of Pearly Gates veritably shimmers. Say what you will about ProTools (and I’ve said it all), one of the unintended side-effects of the digital recording revolution and the ever-more-astounding quality of its product is that we may perhaps, for the first time in musical history, be approaching something like a meritocracy; when the stuff musicians are doing at home sounds as good as the stuff on the radio, it all comes down to the quality of the song. And like I said, "Pearly Gates" is a fucking beautiful one.
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