- PVT have returned. After nearly twenty years, four albums and two vowels, the Australian trio have once again delivered another album that shifts in time, space and sound. Just as they’ve done it in the past so it is in the present, New Spirit sounds detached and familiar when appreciating their discography as a whole. As a single collection of songs, well, let's get zeitgeisty.

PVT have always had a flair for juicy conceptual frameworks and with New Spirit it’s a little more overt than usual. Which isn’t unusual, as I’ve mentioned. This is guided meditation by the brothers Pike and Dave Miller. New Spirit is a Buddhist beat tape, noble truths and all.

Well, it’s not purely Buddhist. There are some lyrics that are vaguely Confucian in their imagery as well. It’s just that the album has a distinct vibe. The singing softer and with shifted pitch alludes to throat singing. There's lot of soft mallet sounds, tuned metallic percussion and so the arps are increasingly pensive. It is a generally calm album, considered. Even at its dynamic peaks, the drums have certainly been louder, grittier, more boisterous than in the past. You don’t have to make the easy assumption about getting softer with age, Richard Pike just straight up tells you.

The first half of the album is all individual suffering and after five tracks it’s really sinking in: life is suffering, acceptance is key, you’re older, wiser and have new hair in weird places. It’s once you make it through the pilgrimage that is the Morning Mist Rock Island Bend, that the album zooms out from the individual and the last three songs really tie the room together. Murder Mall is an indictment on late stage capitalism, New Spirit is the noble MO and Fake Sun In China is the manifesto. 

Are broken systems and temporal shifts getting you down? PVT’s New Spirit recognises modern suffering and, in a way, encourages acceptance and adaptation. To meditate with New Spirit as a guide may bring you to the conclusion that with a housing bubble, mass migration and rising sea levels it’s probably best to acquire a boat. After all, I’m fairly sure it was either Buddha or Confucius who said “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man the ways of Waterworld and he’ll live through cataclysmic events.”

- NJR.