Altered Zones

By Emilie Friedlander

MP3: Puro Instinct: "Stilyagi (feat. Ariel Pink)"

MP3: Puro Instinct: "Silky Eyes"

Puro Instinct is the Los Angeles duo of sisters Piper and Skylar Kaplan, aged 23 and 16. They began making music when Piper, already a fixture on the Ariel Pink-centric freak-pop circuit, DJed a show by home recording legend R. Stevie Moore at NYC’s Cake Shop, and ended up laying down some vox on one of his recordings. Back in LA, the story goes, Piper penned a few bedroom numbers with her sister, christened the project "Pearl Harbor” (and sometimes, “Pearl Harbour”), and recorded some preliminary demos with Cole Greif-Neill of Haunted Graffiti and The Samps. Though they subsequently changed their name to Puro Instinct, Piper’s explanation for the original moniker gives us some idea of what we’re getting into on their debut LP: “We’re an American band, man, and with any luck, we too will go down as a great disaster in the history of the Pacific West Coast.”

It should also ward off facile comparisons to labelmate and fellow SoCal songstress Best Coast straight away. If you’re looking for instantly gratifying stoner-pop, Headbangers On Ecstasy probably won’t deliver. Even on standout singles like “Stilyagi” and album closer “Love Goon,” we cannot avoid the feeling that we’re listening to some bizarre succession of poorly charting ‘70s soft rock hits-- stadium rock classics that failed to hit the stadium, perhaps even failed as songs. We remember the naive approximation of rock that The Shaggs and their starry-eyed stage dad once tried to bring to the world. Or, the ‘80s Russian Red Wave artists who, Piper assures us, fashioned their own new wave out of the limited musical information from the West that managed to leak through the Iron Curtain.

Here and there, we catch a radio-worthy power chorus (“Stilyagi,” “Silky Eyes”), an exquisitely crafted, New Order-throwback guitar lick (“Everybody’s Sick,” “Luv Goon”); but like the music of friend and collaborator Ariel Pink, these glazed confections are too structurally inconsistent to be anything but pleasantly monotonous, like the sound blaring from some one else’s shower radio (no wonder the record is laced throughout with faux station announcements). Instead of hooks or climaxes, we find ourselves concentrating on an overall "feel"-- the satiny, buttery, sugarplum-studded pop patina that Piper and Skyler finetuned in the control room with R. Stevie Moore, Haunted Graffiti member Kenny Gilmore, and even Mr. Pink himself. If you find this record slightly flat, even boring at points, you’re probably right. The Kaplans don't make straight-ahead rock; they make rock music about rock music, about trying and failing, reaching for the glittering transcendence of the perfect pop song (as any self-respecting Stevie Nicks or Chrissie Hynde or Debby Harry might do) and falling just a hair short of disaster. This music is full of smoke and mirrors, and there's some humility in that.

Headbangers In Ecstasy is out now on Mexican Summer. Check out our recent interview with Piper Kaplan at the Hollywood Hard Rock Café