Pardoner’s Carefree Quips Hold More Weight on Peace Loving People
The San Francisco quartet turn doomscrolling through the algorithm into a charismatic, heartfelt punk album
I don’t envy rock and roll bands. Their job is no longer merely to get us dancing. They are competing with all our incessant bullshit: “Are you wearing that flannel ironically, bro?” “Have you heard, Die Kruezen is out, and now Stereolab is in?” Rock and roll bands need to deal with stan culture, with The Algorithm, with our fly-by-night attention spans—our podcasts, playlists, zines, Depop shops and Substacks. They need to make us laugh, feel, mosh and, okay, maybe dance, too, if they have time. They need to change with the times, and they need to do it all for free.
Pardoner are one rock and roll band that rise to this challenge. Riffing and quipping across society’s uneven terrain, the San Francisco quartet decry everyone from trend-hoppers to NRA jagoffs to themselves, cognizant of where their art lands in the late-capitalist commotion. “Look at all the little artists / Chasing a dream every day / While people sleep outside and starve” goes one sobering barb from their new record Peace Loving People.
Self-deprecation is a throughline for this band—“No one needs me / I’m a passing fad,” they sang on 2021’s Came Down Different—and that raises a question about the stakes: Are they high because the guys have to justify their “selfish” pursuit, or low because none of this shit matters anyway? What do the artists owe to themselves, or to others? Max Freeland, Trey Flanigan, River Van Den Berghe and Colin Burris spend their fourth album indirectly circling this idea, musing on their identity as a self-proclaimed “deadbeat band.”
Organized around skew-whiff pop hooks and hardcore-punk dynamism, Peace Loving People is a stream of Gen Z consciousness. It’s a therapy session in which many stones are overturned: relationships (romantic and canine); ambition and failure; drugs, lots and lots of drugs; the Second Amendment; big cities and small paychecks; the ever-shifting alternative landscape; the end of the world as we know it; whether we’ll be fine. Each topic is given equal attention and rubs up against the rest, just as in real life—just as in your Twitter feed.
Some of these subjects are tackled with the sardonic wit that characterized Came Down Different, such as when Freeland (co-guitarist/vocals) snarls, “You gotta change with the times / What else can you do? / Nice belief system, man / Did your mommy make it for you?” But others require a kind of melancholy reflection, an earnestness that we haven’t seen the group offer to this degree: “I got so much left to lose / Seems like I never learn a lesson / Unless the lesson leaves a bruise,” he sings on the crisp, poppy standout “Dreaming’s Free.” Striking a similar tone, “Rosemary’s Gone” may well be Breakup Song Of The Year, molding gnarled guitars and diaristic candor into an alluring, Wowee Zowee-esque puddle of pain (just like love..?).