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For my artful canoodling dollar, it really doesn’t get much better than Growing. Although you might think it a more natural progression for an experimental bloop troupe to start with a grand conceptual structure and spend their lifespan dismantling it, Growing have moved in the other direction, slowly adding rhythmic structures and melodic hints to their free-range sonics. A little order goes a long way in making Pumps! their most accessible album to date, but what makes it their most successful album is that it still sounds like Growing. Jagged patterns of bristling static still brush past one another in chance degrees of synch; remote throbs boil beneath thick strata of white noise; guitars 100 times removed from their strums surface as beautiful damaged interlocking fragments; and the voice of new member Sadie Laska pushes through the mix like shoots of wild non-verbal brush. “Challenger” has a bit of a Brooklyn after-hours booty factor, a low groaning synth surfacing like the back of a whale every minute or so. “Massive Dropout” huffs and puffs in place as little streams of melody leak from flaws in its rhythm. “Camera 84” sounds like a song falling into place from high in the sky, the surface of the tape increasingly pelted with funky debris, till we have no choice but to process it as rhythmic. It’s been a long time since adventurous music felt like such an adventure.
