{"id":70936,"date":"2025-08-15T06:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T06:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/70936\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T06:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T06:14:07","slug":"pile-sunshine-and-balance-beams-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/70936\/","title":{"rendered":"Pile: Sunshine and Balance Beams Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a few years there, Pile<\/a> seemed to be tired of being Pile. Who can blame them? Being Pile seems exhausting: playing like Shellac<\/a> hopped up on caffeine, seeing out their 30s in sweaty punk clubs, having to think about Stephen Miller<\/a> night after night.<\/p>\n

After 2019\u2019s heady, ambitious Green and Gray<\/a>, the once prolific Boston DIY heroes took their time crafting a follow-up, instead dropping a collection of improvisational pieces<\/a> and another of shakily recorded solo renditions of Pile songs<\/a>. When a fully fledged album, All Fiction<\/a>, finally arrived in 2023, it was uncharacteristically muted. Rick Maguire\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Well, maybe both. What\u2019s impressive, even a bit confounding, about Pile\u2019s 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\u2019s not really the same group that melted heads in Shea Stadium<\/a> a decade ago. This Pile album opens with a swelling orchestral overture (\u201cBalance Beams\u201d) 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. \u201cDeath comes in all shapes,\u201d he broods near the end of \u201cMeanwhile Outside,\u201d 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\u2019s words.<\/p>\n

Sunshine and Balance Beams retains much of the atypical instrumentation of All Fiction, but it\u2019s employed in the service of fuller, more satisfying songs. \u201cBouncing in Blue\u201d 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\u2019s not-so-secret weapon, rises to the occasion with Bonham-esque intensity, but he\u2019s equally adept using brushes instead of sticks on \u201cCarrion Song,\u201d a subtly fatalistic ballad that closes out the album with pillowy strings caressing Maguire\u2019s visions of his own demise. \u201cLet them feed on me\/My offering in death\u201d may seem like a gloomy note to end on, but it\u2019s actually kind of upbeat compared to Maguire\u2019s songs about the music industry and the psychic stress of eking out a creative career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a few years there, Pile seemed to be tired of being Pile. Who can blame them? Being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-70936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}