Pegasus Dream
Painting Pantheons
Portland, OR
“A PDX pop opus”
Listening to Painting Pantheons, you’ll find similarities between vocalist JT Lindsey’s multi-tracked pipes and those of Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal. You might also hear RATATAT in the interplay between Lindsey’s soaring guitar leads and Andy Carlson’s keyboards. That’s okay: the band even admits their fanhood on Facebook. But this Portland duo exudes a joyous quality in their amateurish and appropriated dance-pop hooks that’s uniquely endearing, if a little off-kilter.
With tracks often seamlessly mixed together into an 80-minute opus (although the jig is up on that secret closing track, guys – it’s just the preceding record in reverse), Painting Pantheons transitions from electronic-kissed Shins pop (“Stars Light the Way”) to batty chiptune prog (“Its Ill Eagle”) without so much as batting a conceptual eyelid. “Lady Luck,” for which the guys self-directed a trippy video, manages multiple such schizoid logic leaps.
It’d be easy to fall too far into lock-grooves with their aforementioned influences or drift into left field with overly complex experiments, but Pegasus Dream played this record like a skillful game of Jenga, stacking its musical building blocks to precarious heights by employing a surprisingly mature sense of architecture. Some of the sounds may be the same, but Painting Pantheons makes them play nice with the weirdos. (Self-released)
Produced, mixed and programmed by JT Lindsey // Synth and additional programming by Andy Carlson
-Michael Orme