It’s been decades since Bruce Soord was the sole creative force behind veteran prog project the Pineapple Thief, yet the Yeovil, UK-based guitarist/vocalist is quick to note that It Leads to This – their 15th full-length – is far and away the most collaborative effort yet.
In recent years, Soord would shoot out tracks to a pool of players, who would add ideas piecemeal; this time around, he drove out to drummer Gavin Harrison (also of Porcupine Tree)’s home studio to employ “old-school writing techniques” – ie, by jamming things out together.
Pineapple Thief’s founder admits, however, that he was caught off-guard when Harrison started their sessions by twitching out the 5/4 shuffle pattern that now drives the record’s Rubicon – a rhythmic twist Soord wasn’t sure he’d ever heard before, or even knew how to handle. It took a few moments to get into the groove.
“[He] kept expecting me to come up with something,” Soord recalls lightly of being put on the spot, ultimately deciding to chunk things through with a coterie of baritone noise chords. “You’re so used to having this luxury when you’re doing it remotely: send me a part and I can sit down, have a think, go for a walk, and a couple of days later send in my ideas. This was really intense!”
Just as Rubicon is expertly discombobulated – beyond its rhythmic pivots, a tone-dissecting schmear of granular delay re-contextualizes Soord’s nimble vibrato work – the songwriting experience left the bandleader “mentally exhausted” and outside of his comfort zone. Nevertheless, Soord was primed to plunge into the unknown.
Gear-wise, that meant incorporating both acoustic and single-coil electric baritones onto the LP, which brought arrangements down a few keys, inspired some chordal dissonance and opened up Soord’s vocal range to new possibilities.
Then again, Soord also points to the whammy effects programmed into his Kemper profiler as a distinct flavor on the record – an expressive, octave-hopping lead on All That Is Left leaps out the speakers like an intergalactic theremin transmission. Elsewhere, he newly contemplates “American country” through the wheat thistle fingerstyle of finale To Forget.
One of the record’s most leftfield moments, however, is the distinctive, soul-prog slap-and-pop bassist Jon Sykes brings to Every Trace of Us, something Soord couldn’t have anticipated when he first wrote this wistful fist-pumper.
25 years on from starting Pineapple Thief as a one-man studio venture, though, Soord fully trusts when to step back and let his bandmates shine. “I think one of the big things where the band has got better is [that] I’ve learned to completely let go and say, ‘That’s different… but let’s go with it!’”
- It Leads to This is out now via KSCOPE.
