Pet Fox: A Face In Your Life

The members of Pet Fox have been percolating in the musical ecosystem of the eastern seaboard long enough to learn a few tricks. The three-piece puts them to good use on their label debut LP A Face In Your Life. The delectation is in the details: it’s the light touch that lifts this album from post punk pablum to a standout in 2022.

The meat of the album is coolly-executed rock riffing that drapes pert melodies over the time-tested template of loud/quiet/loud. Shades of Q and Not U meets Sebadoh. Songs like “Settle Even,” “Only Warning,” and “Checked Out” follow the strategy with aplomb. Pet Fox shys away from maximum contrast versions of the formula (scream/whisper/scream) for a more subtle middle ground (outside voice/inside voice/outside voice), which fits their mojo. The band is more “fun drinking buddy with secret sadness” than “stranger who showed up alone to the party and is now doing fentanyl in the corner, omg.”

The title track “A Face In Your Life” tenders a more ambitious Pet Fox. The song features an almost tropical rhythm, lithe fretwork, and evocative lyrics that create an atmosphere worthy of Antônio Carlos Jobim – until the band wads it all up into a ball and feeds it into a stompboxed, Foo Fighting meatgrinder. The dropoff from sunny sleeper to hellfire rager sports shades of the legendary transition in Radiohead’s “Creep.” Pet Fox operates here like a surgeon who removes only the strictly necessary instruments from the medical case, diagnoses the situation with a single glance, and sets to work.

Unexpected moods abound on A Face In Your Life, conjured up with a minimum of fuss. “Thanksgiving” uses a spare beat, whammied chord, and wide open spaces to create the kind of atmospheric slo-rock swagger that Angelo Badalamenti would write if he grew up listening to postpunk. And though the song thickens righteously like soup on the stove, it stays faithful to its original sonic principle by resisting the urge to speed up and ball out.

Pet Fox

“Hesitate” pinpoints a psychological state of mind with a bass line on tenterhooks accompanied by a spindly guitar. The ambience of casual discomfort is heightened through Theo Hartlett’s lead vocals, which maintain the sense of pathos you might hear in the voice of a domesticated West Coast surf punk. Breezy disaffection mixed with quiet desperation. He can deliver a lyrical phrase in artful monotone to hint at the hot embers of inner turmoil, though sometimes it just sounds like he’s on too much Xanax.

On the closer “Slows Me Down” a wrinkled, whammied chord leads a downbeat jam that peers into the abyss of emo, but pulls back to a safe distance with a few well-timed licks too twee for sulking.

The light touch indicates songwriting with ambitions beyond the confines of the usual pop-rock palaver, which typically finds its tasty hook and clubs you over the head with it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But Pet Fox has tapped some richer veins on A Face In Your Life that deserve a close listen and solid appreciation. When it hits, it really hits, and makes you wonder what’s on tap next for the band from Boston.

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