Album review: Thomas Giles – Pulse

People within the range of my internet hearing aid have been going on about Between the Buried And Me for flipping ages, and I’ve somehow managed to completely avoid hearing anything they’ve recorded thus far. (This avoidance has not been deliberate, I might point out; there’s a lot of new music out there, and my available hours for exploring it have been thin on the ground of late.) The closest I’ve come so far is Pulse, a solo album from BTBAM frontperson Thomas Giles (who usually operates under the more apple-pie moniker of Tommy Rogers Jr), which is a sufficiently interesting insight into his ideas to make me want to find out more, even though it’s ultimately a bit disappointing.

The problem for this listener is that Giles spends too much time on the (admittedly innovative and distinctive) close detail work and too little on the song-level structure. Instant comparisons to Porcupine Tree are unavoidable, thanks to Giles’ predominantly clean and boyish singing style, plus frequent detours into the winsome yet paranoid nostalgia-for-an-anxious-youth atmosphere that Stephen Wilson’s lyrics tend to evoke. But the comparison only goes so far, not least because Giles is less interested in retaining the “live rock band” vibe than he is conjuring up experimental soundscapes in his own studio.

Top marks for ambition, then… but the quality is variable, as is the pacing. Some songs seem little more than sketches (such as “Reject Falicon”), while others are stretched almost to translucency by their own weight (like the latter half of “Reverb Island”, outstaying its welcome and dulling the impact of follow-up track “Mr. Bird” as a result); there’s no shortage of interesting ideas on display (not to mention sonic variety), but beyond the dominant piano tones and Giles’s voice itself, there’s little sense of continuity or narrative to Pulse as a whole (though longer exposure might reveal the story hidden within the songs, if there’s one to find â€" such is the nature of progressive rock, after all).

Indeed, Giles’s striving for variety may well be the root cause of my discontentment, in that he’s borrowed a wide pallet of sounds from beyond metal’s borders without knowing how to deploy them to his best advantage. Tones and tricks from techno and other electronic styles are plentiful, but they lack the verve and flair of experienced production: the percussion tracks plod when they should thump (or shatter when they should slice), the synths resurrect riffs and patches that were sounding tired on the mid-nineties rave/dance circuit (as in the cheddary bleeps, bloops and hoover-bass of “Sleep Shake”), and the alchemical marriage of rock and electronica â€" something that has rarely been achieved with real success, to be fair â€" remains unconsummated.

Electronica has its own vocabulary and grammar as well as its own tones, and Giles’s inexperience with the former is what breaks the spell of Pulse; as bilingual albums go, it’s a bold attempt, but Giles’s glimpse exceeds his grasp this time, with frequent moments where he’s just not speaking like a native. Ironically, this is most obvious on the heaviest and most metallic track; “Medic” goes for the classic Strapping Young Lad sound (leaving it very much the album’s odd man out), but the programmed drums sound artificial and lifeless, the wall of guitar sounds thin and overprocessed, and the song is insufficiently stirring to overcome the production values.

Flawed as it may be, Pulse still gets a thumbs-up in this household. Ambition counts for a lot, after all, especially in this era of ubiquitous retro retreading, and the most simple naked tracks â€" such as “Scared”, as plaintive a tune as its title would suggest, with Giles’s high, gentle voice and some guitar arpeggios all that keep us from toppling into some unacknowledged personal abyss â€" have a sincerity that I don’t hear as often as I’d like. Thomas Giles may have failed to make Pulse the perfect album, but he took a bloody good swing at it; next time, I want to see him knock it for six.

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