#exploding in sound

Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis writes in the press bio of All Fiction that Maguire was heavily influenced by Mt. Eerie’s unusual timbres, Kate Bush’s ambition and Aphex Twin’s production. Broadcast, Krzysztof Penderecki, Portishead and Tinariwen are invoked as reference points. He says he was tired of the band’s identity, that he’d switched from a guitar to using synthesizers as his main instrument for composition, that lyrical directness took a backseat to more abstract forms of word association, that he “wanted to use different instruments and recording techniques to highlight the songs rather than creating the visual of a band performing them.” To hear Pile tell it, All Fiction is the band’s Kid A, a decadently grand break from the past.

This is an overstatement. In the same way that some people only know how to be who they are regardless of what they go through, Pile’s reinvention is by a matter of degrees, a slow-burning battle of inches. Perhaps more than anything, what All Fiction makes clear is that every new Pile record is the most like themselves they could possibly sound; it is the most Pile listeners have ever heard the band be.

Don’t read that in a negative light, though. Lessons learned both from the full-on improv jam sessions that comprised In the Corners of a Sphere-Filled Room and Maguire’s pandemic pet project of solo reworkings of old material, Songs Known Together, Alone, have fed directly into two fistfuls of songs that are at once as tight and as expansive as the band has ever been. The trio isn’t unrecognizable in their compositions, but it’s the way they use space that appears to have shifted. The result is formidable for fans and an easy entry point for those just joining the journey.

“Loops” was a logical first single, but its prominent, unusually polished percussion suggested this was going to be a much heavier record sonically than it is. More indicative is the last half-minute’s reverb-heavy solo guitar outro, which I said upon its release hints at a whole other song, a whole other world. That whole other world, as it turns out, is the record writ large: Though longtime acolytes will appreciate there are grimy guitar tones on “Gardening Hours” and a dour downtuning on, say, “Link Arms,” Maguire himself shoulders the weight of topics including the subjectivity of perception (it’s right there in the title, after all), big tech, the nature of making art, and the usual human concerns of anxiety and death while the music follows fleet-footed behind his instantly recognizable, miasmatic delivery punctuated by unshakable epigrams and notes that slide in and out of language.

For years, my biggest complaint about this band was how almost good they were at sequencing to the point that I thought they were doing it intentionally; think of how jarring A Hairshirt of Purpose’s segue from “Hairshirt” to “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore” is, or the jam tacked onto “Appendicitis” in what otherwise would’ve been a perfect album closer for You’re Better Than This. That kind of maddening internal logic was part of their smirking low-stakes charm and a quirk you could (and I did) come to love. But something happened with Green and Gray in which they fully, finally worked out that the “rock” parts could commingle with the quieter, more introspective moments in a more fluid fashion, often in the same song. What resulted was 2019’s best album.

All Fiction furthers that thinking, another reason this feels less like a leap and more like a carefully considered step toward further Piledom — the band’s flowing, peripatetic nature makes writing about individual songs less important than considering the whole. It’s easy to catch yourself relistening to “Nude With a Suitcase” to see if there’s a bassline leitmotif from “Gardening Hours” (or some other record, not for the first time with this band) or wondering how the nearly five-minute “Blood” passes by percussionless at the same emotional tenor as the rest or considering how smartly the string quartet is deployed as a through-line from “It Comes Closer” right down to the final swell of “Neon Gray.” It wouldn’t be Pile without a transition like the one from “Forgetting” to “Poisons,” but even that still manages to work in context; if such things bother you, too, you’ll find yourself forgetting it’s there on repeat listens.

All of this writes around what All Fiction distilled to, which is what Pile has always distilled to: a guy wrestling with life’s antagonistic forces, trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t easily offer up proof of any. Green and Gray was an apotheosis of that, a resigned sigh backing reluctantly out of youth. All Fiction does the same, mostly with topics larger than relationships, but it’s still those unadorned drippings scattered across an increasingly surreal lyrical landscape that hit home hardest. On “Neon Gray,” Maguire laments, “Digging at nothing without romance / It’s just mist, but not from this distance / It’ll work until it won’t, I guess.” The beauty of this delivery can’t be overstated as the album’s last clearly sung words before the strings surge and his final chorus carries you out. Like any great Pile song (or any art worth a damn, really), it lodges in your throat, chokes you up, gets you thinking — and if what you’re thinking after a listen through All Fiction is that Pile is still your favorite band’s favorite band, it’s past time you found a new favorite band.