Pressing Concerns: Pacing, ‘Songs’

Release date: January 7^th
Record label: Asian Man
Genre: Anti-folk, indie pop, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk, twee
Formats: CD, digital

Those of you who were following this blog in 2023 may remember Pacing from their album Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen, which came out in October of that year and ended up being one of my favorite LPs from 2023. That album’s gleeful mix of “anti-folk”, indie/bedroom pop, twee, and “not-anti” folk music, combined with an incredible songwriter in bandleader Katie McTigue, really blew me away, and I wasn’t the only one. 2024 was an active year for Pacing as well, featuring a couple of one-off singles in “Boyfriends” (with Career Woman’s Melody Caudill) and “Tortilla Chip Bag Song”, an oddly captivating covers EP called Pretty Filthy, and a vinyl release of Real poetry… courtesy of Pacing’s shiny new record label, Asian Man Records (“We’re his favorite band in a one mile radius,” says McTigue, who apparently lives just down the street from label founder Mike Park). Pacing have been working on a proper follow-up to Real poetry… for a while now, but that’s not what their first new music on Asian Man, Songs, is.

If you haven’t gathered based on Pacing’s frequent release schedule, McTigue is somebody who’s constantly creating and bringing something new to life, a side product of which might be getting burned out on working on one thing (say, Pacing LP2) intensely for a long time. So, as a distraction from those songs, she made nine “Songs”. Songs is twelve minutes long. It’s a “mini-album” if it has to be called anything, or maybe it’s just “songs”. Most of these (with a couple of exceptions) are written and played by McTigue herself. “Tortilla Chip Bag Song” (a song where McTigue sings the copy of a back of a bag of Las Fortunitas Tortilla Chips) from last year is on here, and it’s one of the longest things on the record. Only one of these songs is more than two minutes long. The naming conventions are aggressively low-key and casual (“Expired Yogurt Song”, “Haircut Song”, “Weird Hell Song”, et cetera). McTigue assures us that they are “uncomplicated” and “don’t tie back to some grand elaborate map of concepts” on the record’s Bandcamp page.

Pacing seems to be doing everything possible to minimize and temper expectations for Songs–maybe it’s because it’s bad, you might think, but because it’s not, I would guess the reason for this is because McTigue made a throwaway release that’s too good for that and this is some halfhearted attempt at damage control (there is allegedly a “real” Pacing album coming soon, after all, and McTigue and Mike Park will probably want me to write about that, too). If Songs is a hot dog-esque byproduct of the sessions for Pacing LP2, however, it functions very well as a teaser for its release. Like I said earlier, for the most part this is just McTigue on her own, and those moments only serve to confirm that she’s still one of the sharpest and most unique songwriters operating in the present, and the moments where collaborators pop up (like her band, bassist Ben Krock and drummer Joe Sherman, or Melody Caudill again, or noted Pacing associates Walk the Whale) feel like a peek at a widening range of the “Pacing sound” that I look forward to hearing in a more formal setting (and, actually, some of the McTigue solo material has this “just wait” quality to it, too). 

The most obvious example of all of this on Songs is the second song and “hit” of the record, “Parking Ticket Song”. Songs hooks us with an excellent transition from the uncertain, acoustic anti-folk of opening track “Expired Milk Song” (which is also very good) to a high-flying song about never remembering to do anything about a parking ticket on one’s car “except for when I’m driving”. The first half of the track features the same ingredients as “Expired Milk Song”, but it has a zippiness to it that matches McTigue’s stream of consciousness lyrics (“I can’t really think except for when I’m doing something with my hands / To keep my mind occupied / Like 70%”). “Parking Ticket Song” to me is about the benefits and drawbacks of being somebody who lets their “instincts” take the reins, either as a coping mechanism for avoiding harder decisions or as a way to maintain some kind of artistic “purity”. It might lead you to sit in the car looking at your phone for a long time after arriving home even if you could go look at your phone in your house with just a bit of focused effort, or write a song with lyrics like “I’m staring at the parking ticket / I don’t remember getting it / So it’s not my fault”, or turning an anti-folk song into a pop punk track at the drop of a hat (which is what happens all of a sudden halfway through “Parking Ticket Song”, when Krock and Sherman spring into action to meet Asian Man Records’ contractual pop punk requirements).

Katie McTigue can make “rock music” on her own, too, apparently–it’s in the air right now in Pacing-land, I think. “Haircut Song” and “Weird Hell Song” are snippets from a darker and heavier (musically) Pacing universe, McTigue sounding compressed and crushed by the march and pile-up of expectations brought upon by time in the former track (that wordless refrain is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here), and the sub-sixty-second partial mental breakdown of the latter track isn’t any brighter (between the contradictory lyrics and the bizarre, incorrect version of “dance music” that crops up towards the end of the track, it kind of feels like a Pacing version of a song by Cheekface, with whom they’ll be touring later this year). “Parking Ticket…Song” (distinct from the earlier “Parking Ticket Song”) is also kind of rock music, but it’s the result of McTigue enlisting Walk the Whale’s Logan Castro to turn a recording of the phone robot representing “the City of Los Angeles’ Parking Violations Bureau” into an overwhelming, splashy technicolor pop rock masterpiece (the absurd repetition of “Press niiiiiiiiiiiine” will never leave my brain).

The more I think about it, everything on Songs has some kind of surprising twist or addition to it that I don’t think I would’ve predicted before giving it a spin. The song with Caudill, “New Song with Mel”, basically rejects the sweetness of their last song together, “Boyfriends”, in favor of a flat kind of dread, a song with a creeping tension that’s only broken by the two of them yelling/droning “aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh” together for a refrain. “No more songs!” is the familiar folk-pop Pacing, but, for one, it’s possibly the most meta track on the whole album (“I want crazy chords and times / Like ones that I read about,” goes the refrain), and it’s surprisingly polished both from a vocal perspective (I didn’t know McTigue could sing like that! Or, probably more accurately, I didn’t know that she wanted to!) and a musical one (I don’t know who Noah Sanchez de Tagle is, but those are some nice bass contributions). I know McTigue said there’s no overarching theme on Songs, and I’m not trying to call her a liar, but I do keep thinking about the last line of “Expired Milk Song” in the context of a record that eagerly jumps from idea to idea and tries out a ton of different modes of presentation. “Embarrassed to admit that / I’m not the best at these things,” McTigue murmurs at the end of a song where she calls both herself and her fans stupid. This captures a moment of shame at not being the “best” at any one of the jars of honey Pacing have their fingers in at any given moment on this record. This misses the forest for the trees, of course, as the rest of Songs remind us of something that’s as true now as it’s ever been–Pacing are the absolute best when it comes to making Pacing songs. Their record is unblemished. (Bandcamp link)