Mary plays drums and synth, Steve plays guitar and sings. On this brand new album, presented by the lovely Run of the Mill Records the SuperGeek duo come out of the minimalist prep room and into the full experimental riches of an added synth and a very sprightly recorded sound.
In the tradition of BILGE PUMP, COWTOWN, D'ASTRO and all their diy comrades in Leeds, PIFCO do sharply played music with intelligence, fun and a self assured sense of the absurdity of everyday life. Their reluctance to flaunt biographies, full names or an elaborate press release is entirely genuine. I have a strong feeling that they made this album "because Sophie asked us" (Sophie McIntosh being the energy behind Run of The Mill Records.)
The only other thing I know about PIFCO is that Mary also plays in D'ASTRO, while Steve is a member of party band COWTOWN. This collaborative, band-straddling thing is a key part of the Leeds diy movement.
So, the music. The eleven songs stay close to half an hour: brisk, efficient, wall rattling things that they are. Muscle-bound, spiky-haired guitar riffs (it's a Rickenbacker) are a crucial part, sometimes reinforced with synth, sometimes out there on their own, Each song song is held together with two or more of them, flamboyantly played and completely nourishing. All of them are inventive and on songs like "The Long Island Incident", the riffs come in a variety of sound effects and with different levels of chord addition. Steve's vocal shouts sympathetically across them, echoing or responding to their fractured inclinations with the timbre of a teenage Mark E. Smith.
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But if you think, for a minute, that this means sub-1976 clang and yell, just ponder the epic three minutes 49 of "Cliff Jumper & Hound", which, while it does clang and it does yell (very agreeably), it also rises rather magnificently on a synth part that smiles radiantly from a great height. It's these flourishes of creative fun that really makes the whole thing worth the investment. Like rays of sunshine on the faded brick of a terrace of Leeds houses or a hormone-crazed blackbird challenging the city neighbourhood to battle for a hen at 4 am.
If out-of-focus retro has turned you against the great years of punk and post punk - just bury yourself in the guitar-wrestling madness of "Facewallpaper" for a couple of spin cycles and all will be well!
"All good! It's all good!" shouts Steve in "Jonny No Name". Fresh as you like.
www.myspace.com/pifco1
www.last.fm/music/Pifco
www.runofthemillrecords.co.uk
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