by osmosis

Perceiving a music has a great deal to do with the time and place that one encounters it. It’s kinda like the difference between watching a movie on a big screen or your laptop. The experience can impact the film, painting, band or whatever dependent upon the viewers situation. There’s some trumped up philosophical discourse relating to literature replete with a fancy name that describes this - Reader-Response criticism. Don’t waste your time, but some of it’s almost valid.

Anyway, I first heard Pterodactyl in 2004. The band played a DIY venue in the Puerto Rican ghetto on the west side of Cleveland called The Tower. A few straight punk bands played that evening and while Pterodactyl did and still does (kinda) have that influence tossed into its music, the band easily stood out from the other performers that evening. The place was packed, there wasn’t a fight, but I got yelled at by a friend’s ex – which was funny in retrospect. But since that evening, whatever music Pterodactyl releases reminds me more of that evening and it’s events than music that I care too much about.

That’s not to discredit the band. Out of the post-post-punk explosion over the last decade, the droney, repetitive acrobatics of Pterodactyl seem separate from most of what’s lauded in the press. The 2006 release of the band’s self titled disc – alternately referred to as Bluebird – on Brah Records dialed back some of the band’s more extremist tendencies to incorporate vocals more fully. And of course, some may differ in opinion as to whether or not that move worked out, but that first disc was obviously a band pushing to figure a hook, an essence.

It might not be agreed upon that this new disc, Worldwild, is a distillation of the group’s musical theories, but it is unquestionably a unified assault on rock music. In reading about the disc, Animal Collective has occasionally been referenced as a touchstone. But any group at this point with a few dudes singing a hook might succumb to that pratfall – “Alex” is one of these moments from the new disc. Fortunately, Pterodactyl not only doesn’t really sound like AC too much, the band at times reverts back to its earlier incarnation, eschews vocals and rips a few good progressions.

Album closer, shackled with hippie abandon, “One with Everyone,” sounds as much like ‘80s thrash as any offering from a group of Brooklynites has in a while. There’s a bit of harmonizing, which accentuates the pace of the work. But even the melodic sweetness of the singing doesn’t detract from the pacing of the music. It’s this weird amalgamation of styles that could make some conclude that Pterodactyl are poised to become something more than it’s band members were ever able to imagine.