We Spent Weeks Learning Our Mistakes: An Interview With Pylon's Vanessa Briscoe Hay

Pylon Reenactment Society's Magnet Factory is out tomorrow

Pylon Reenactment Society (Photo by Christy Bush)

That headline comes from Vanessa Briscoe Hay in 2016, when I had the good fortune to speak with the surviving members of Pylon for a SPIN feature when the band was releasing a live album from the final show of their original incarnation in 1983. After the late, inventive guitarist Randy Bewley died, drummer Curtis Crowe and bassist Michael Lachowski have mostly retired from music. But the idiosycrantic frontwoman been leading Pylon Reenactment Society for close to a decade now, alongside bassist Kay Stanton, guitarist Jason NeSmith, and drummer Gregory Sanders. If there was ever a band who earned a reenactment society, Pylon makes perfect sense — they were the exact midpoint between the B-52s’ danceable propulsion and Gang of Four’s art-school abstractions.

As such, their music on their very first single threatened to “eat dub for breakfast” while still sarcastically/diplomatically declaring “everything is, everything is, everything is, everything is cooooooool.” Being good working-class art-schoolers, their inspirations included factories, traffic cones, and Scrabble. Pylon’s rhythmic force, inclusive mood, and kinetic approach to punk was both ahead of its time and fully emblematic of rock’s sea change toward dance music as the ‘80s began. Briscoe Hay’s panoply of onomatopoeic grunts made for a tenser and less topical call-and-response with the interplay between Bewley’s riffs and Lachowski’s thump than, say, Talking Heads, who’d moved onto Al Green and African polyrhythms by the time the Athens scene was establishing itself. It’s hard to sound primal and nonchalant at the same time but there’s never been another band like Pylon.

Until now, anyway. Out tomorrow is Magnet Factory, the debut album from Pylon Reenactment Society, and to say it picks up where things left off is an understatement. The new band sounds both fuller and sparer than Pylon in different ways, having absorbed more than a few developments since 1983 like drum machines, stray Sonic Youth-style freeform noises, and the integration of, yes, dub rhythms into the rock playbook. The songs are indeed magnetic and you won’t be able to guess which ones date back to 1980 without checking the credits. And Kate Pierson herself duets on a showstopper called “Fix It” that’ll make you wish they joined forces ages ago. I’d call it Briscoe Hay’s best album since Chomp and one of the most enjoyable so far of this very young year. The singer graciously spoke to RIOTRIOT via phone about this welcome, decade-in-the-making surprise, and below is our chat.