3 out of 5

Label: Chunklet Industries

Produced by: Gary T. Flom (recorded by)

The three gents from instrumental rock band The Purkinje Shift are depicted on Threads’ cover as all wearing suits, glasses, and sporting short cropped hair, while quite focused on their individual instruments. While they certainly aren’t the first band to present this type of visual, it very much fits for their sound: focus on the craft, but also conformity.

I love instrumental hard rock. I’d like to claim my collection is more varied than it likely is, and a good chunk of that non-variance is due to instrumental stuff in the vein of The Purkinje Shift. The group has been kicking around on and off since the late 90s, so there are bona fides there; and Threads – their first full album since 2012 – has riffs, and cool stops and starts, and all-out rocking moments, and very much does the job of an instrumental rock album.

But you can see my wording there – it’s also a very workmanship-type release. That’s not at all the same as going through the motions, more just that this reads as a band setting out an outline for themselves and sticking to it; the “surprises” when the group switches from a kind of march-like pace and tone to louder volumed moments are programmed where they need to be, and there’s a kind of military dedication to sticking within the borders of a Purkinje sound, where the guitars always sound like X, the drums like Y, the lap steel like Z. There’s nothing really wrong with this approach, especially when they players are all good at their jobs, but in the genre, it’s also very, very safe, and thus doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from other bands or albums. Even a track where the group kind of slows down to breathe in and get more melodic than angular – closer Sweet Science being the primary example – it’s like there’s a rush right at the end to get back in line, and stick to a 4 or 5-minute mark.

The straight-ahead momentum has some krautrock underpinnings, a la Turing Machine, but Purkinje is more towards the rock n’ roll spectrum, like a slightly mathed-up Fucking Champs. If you haven’t been surfing this scene for very long, TPS undeniably plug a gap. But – at least with this album – it’s potentially a stepping stone to more adventurous offerings.