Pillar Point – “Dove”

Exciting grooves for discerning wallflowers arrive this week courtesy of Pillar Point, the electronic project of Seattle-based musician Scott Reitherman. “Dove” shows his savvy crossing the borders of of dance and rock, transforming a smart, pithy composition with the sublime throb and delectable melancholy of deep house. Reitherman’s bona fides as songwriter and bandleader come from his days in the ‘00s indie-pop group Throw Me The Statue. In Pillar Point, he trains these skills onto a very distinct template, like an Instagram casting a gauzy blue tone.

Pillar Point’s new album Marble Mouth reveals the undeniable influence of 80s dance music. I hear the techno-burble of Heaven 17, the electronic/acoustic syntheses of New Order, the proto-house funk of the Peech Boys, and the teutonic cool of Kraftwerk. Yet if Reitherman is a connoisseur of music recorded around the time he was born, Pillar Point is ultimately a project in sonic impressionism, not genre recreation. Producer Kevin Barnes (from the group of Montreal – dig his bass guitar on “Part Time Love”) assists valuably in drawing great sounds and studio performances out of ‘real’ musicians and inserting them into sonic bricolages that reside outside real time. It’s in this limbo of musical space and emotional projection that Pillar Point dwells, creating music that works on the dancefloor but speaks to the distance away from it.

Marble Mouth comes out January 22 on Polyvinyl Records.