Spend any length of time on the internet nowadays and you generally come out of it feeling like it can be reduced to three or four essential themes: cats, porn, and sepia-tinged photos of food. Oh, and time-lapsed videos. It's with the explosion of content in the latter of these categories that there comes the additional burden of finding appropriately "epic" background music. You know the sort of thing we're talking about here: gradual, almost plodding progressions, life-affirming climaxes, and ideally some really, really big guitars. For a long time bands such as Sigur Rós and Explosions In The Sky were the go to guys. But these two groups only have so much material in their back catalogue, and with the mind-boggling proliferation of sped-up videos of construction projects, rolling cloud formations, and sprawling cityscapes, clearly someone else needs to step in and pick up the slack.
Here's where Pylo come in. For if ever there was a band who could do with having their own time-lapse video, it's Pylo. Indeed, recent slow-burning single "View" fits perfectly into this bracket, to such an extent that the directors behind the accompanying video (Pylo themselves) couldn't actually resist squeezing in a few sunset snaps amongst the Instagram-esque filters and Sunday magazine lifestyle shots. I mean, the chorus even features the refrain "It's quite a view", as if to remind the viewer that it's all pretty fucking beautiful and life-affirming, what's going on here. If anything, they probably missed a trick by not throwing in a screen-obliterating sunrise to go with the wraught outpourings of Aldus' howling soul.
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The usual suspects are here: methodical and measured beginning, soaring, emotive vocals, big, thick slabs of screeing guitar. It's all very earnest, even if not terribly original. And whilst previous single "Enemies" repeats the trick - hanger-engulfing walls of sound, a stadia-ready chorus, meaningful climaxes - it's the rest of the EP that feels a little limited.
"Crying On Land" plays it just a bit too safe and fails to deliver on the meandering promises it makes early on, and by the time closer "Bare Eyed" rolls round, you feel that a bit of variety will be needed come the release of the inevitable debut album.
In the end, for a band so clearly aiming for stratospheric, wide-angle, cinematic rock, the latter tracks of "Bella Vue" feel a little lacking in scope. With "View" and "Enemies", however, it's clear that the band has an ear for a crowd-pleasing tune. At least for now, that's certainly enough promise to be getting on with. No doubt we'll see them on the front of Q Magazine at some point in the near future...
Pylo official site
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