For a few years there, Pile seemed to be tired of being Pile. Who can blame them? Being Pile seems exhausting: playing like Shellac hopped up on caffeine, seeing out their 30s in sweaty punk clubs, having to think about Stephen Miller night after night.
After 2019’s heady, ambitious Green and Gray, the once prolific Boston DIY heroes took their time crafting a follow-up, instead dropping a collection of improvisational pieces and another of shakily recorded solo renditions of Pile songs. When a fully fledged album, All Fiction, finally arrived in 2023, it was uncharacteristically muted. Rick Maguire’s vocals sounded muffled and strange; synths and strings jostled for space in the mix. Had Pile embarked upon their post-rock era? Was this the new Pile, fans wondered, or just a temporary detour?
Well, maybe both. What’s impressive, even a bit confounding, about Pile’s ninth album, Sunshine and Balance Beams, is how well it traverses both paths, restoring the pummeling post-hardcore roar that fans have missed while integrating it with swooning strings and pockets of tenderness. This is undoubtedly a Pile album, with knotty, circuitous melodies that wind their way into thrashing finales, but it’s not really the same group that melted heads in Shea Stadium a decade ago. This Pile album opens with a swelling orchestral overture (“Balance Beams”) and carries a deeply mournful edge, though Maguire seems not so much to be mourning a literal death as the loss of some long-harbored dream for himself. “Death comes in all shapes,” he broods near the end of “Meanwhile Outside,” an eight-minute epic that lingers on its elegiac melodic motif with dirgelike finality. A harmonic accompaniment from backing vocalist Candace Clement underlines the somber weight of Maguire’s words.
Sunshine and Balance Beams retains much of the atypical instrumentation of All Fiction, but it’s employed in the service of fuller, more satisfying songs. “Bouncing in Blue” is a Pile all-timer, morphing from an unnervingly quiet duet between Maguire and icily layered synths to a cataclysmic climax, guitars and drums locked in a frightening communion with curdled horror-score strings. Drummer Kris Kuss, the band’s not-so-secret weapon, rises to the occasion with Bonham-esque intensity, but he’s equally adept using brushes instead of sticks on “Carrion Song,” a subtly fatalistic ballad that closes out the album with pillowy strings caressing Maguire’s visions of his own demise. “Let them feed on me/My offering in death” may seem like a gloomy note to end on, but it’s actually kind of upbeat compared to Maguire’s songs about the music industry and the psychic stress of eking out a creative career.
