Pile’s A Hairshirt of Purpose is one of the most satisfying blends of the punk and post-punk aesthetics to come out of Boston in the past months.
The most satisfying thing about A Hairshirt of Purpose’s dissatisfied, lurching tracks is that, as they reach their climax, and we anticipate their dissolution into a glorious cacophony of yelps and distortion, they don’t. It’s vaguely frustrating, but by denying the listener (or themselves) any immediate resolution to the tension they build up throughout, the band manages to highlight just how well they crafted that tension in the first place.
I imagine frontman Rick Maguire chuckling softly to himself at the end of “Rope’s Length.”
Bet ya thought I was gonna scream there, didn’t you?
“Texas,” one of the more conventional punk tracks on the record, epitomizes the band’s proficiency when it comes to the genre, particularly as they craft a hook out of dissonant guitar notes.
Although it suffers from being too long of a project and lags in the middle, A Hairshirt of Purpose ought to provide all you bald, red, androgynous humans a good, confrontational bathtub to soak your dogs in.
