pulco

Been a long, long while since he graced these pages, no word, no postcard just silence, and then he pops up with two releases in quick succession. We refer of course to Welsh wayward wanderer Pulco who has just land an EP and full length, titled ‘the Gargoyle EP’ and ‘Artzoo’. apparently plundered from the archive, if you can call recordings from 2017 archive, I don’t know, young folk today. Anyway, these recordings date back to just before his transformation into Chow Myng, the EP by all accounts, recorded under the influence of listening to Blurt, no bad thing then. it’s typical Pulco fayre, wiry collage, scabbed strums and that sense of, distractively being somewhere else, appreciably very lo-fi, wasted, the noodling angular accents adoring ‘at the racecourse’ is occasioned by all manner of shuffling, stuttering and shambling antics though once it settles into groove, a curiously glowing psych pop wistful breezes its grooves, kind of God is My Co Pilot and Guided by Voices. ‘feral foods’ is treated with a sparsely cut post punk edgy, as though something fallen off a Peel playlist c. 81/ 82 while ‘toof’ is your straight ahead squirrelling sore thumb all contortionist rythmns and fried jazz spikes, the kind of stuff, that a few years back, you’d have found gracing the Foolproof Projects imprint. Best of the lot though, by a country mile, ‘chip shop blues’ is touched with a Fall-esque crusty that sighs with a could’t care less wandering while filleted through the awkward lens of a youthful Half Man Half Biscuit. cherry picking my through ‘Artzoo’ we arrive at ‘don’y adjust yourself’, a wiring slice of peculiar anti pop conditioning pressed upon oodles upon oodles of skittish and wonky lo-fi electro motifs, its all very discombobulated. there’s always the quite wonderfully demurring ‘non existant’, a shimmering orbital studdded with a beautifully lulling radiance upon which Mr Cooke waxes lyrical, almost had me of a mind to go rooting out those precious Rooney releases from the late 90’s. more Fall-esque psych soft crookedness drops courtesy of the title track ‘Artzoo’ with its dimpling of weezy car boot keyboard while pushed to shove to pick an overall favourite, hands down it’d have to be the scratchy surreal of ‘sinister corners’ with its yuletide glow, hymnal hushes and its oddly off centred whispered haunting, uneasy stuff like with the isolationist parting shot, ‘reptiles’.

https://pulco.bandcamp.com/album/the-gargoyle-ep

https://pulco.bandcamp.com/album/artzoo