Pork Pie’s sophomore full-length, Golden Leaf Sheets, is one trip after another of intoxicating psychedelic garage rock. The songs, rich with riffs, grooves, and heaps of personality, Golden Leaf Sheets is an album that’s full of colors and brimming with confidence.
Second full-length release from Dundalk-based, Irish rock outfit Pork Pie, Golden Leaf Sheets is an album that sees the band pull tight, hairpin turns with their sonic identity, navigating from one song to the next maintaining a consistent aura of mystique, suave psychedelia, and an organic instrumental flair. The presence of guitars and organs in the album consistently balance the songs around a center point. As arrangements lean towards guitars, rock seems to take over, and as they lean towards organs, the psychedelia does. It’s an interesting game and witnessing it unfold throughout the album was very rewarding.
The album begins in a place that’s heated. With sizzling riffs and rock centered arrangements, the first half of Golden Leaf Sheets kicks of thoroughly hard with tracks like the driving starter ‘City Lights’, and the previously covered ‘Helplessly Waiting’, both rocking the garage vibes rather deliciously. ‘The Raven’ is a dynamic song with an infectious forward momentum. Simplistic on the riffs, the song’s melodies play the core role in making it one of the album’s most stand-out cuts, while still sporting a guitar-heavy arrangement, with infectious vocal yells and a wall of lush organs in the background.
Around the album’s 5th track, titled ‘I Want Everything’, the album starts to swing to the reals of prog and psychedelia. The song itself is reminiscent of Pink Floyd rock songs from the first third of their career, with delay-intensive guitar work, abundant tom-tom rolls, shuffling grooves, and frequent beat shifting. ‘I Want Everything’ introduces a different face to Pork Pie, and does it in exquisite style. ‘Golden Leaf Sheets’, the album’s title and penultimate offering, having stepped in deep enough into the psychedelic territory, is a hypnotizing piece of psychedelia that takes a fair amount of time before blossoming into the characterful and distinctive psych rocker that it is, and even then, it remains restrained and controlled in its low-burning chaos. For a 6-minute song, it is the album’s boldest arrangement.
‘Cabin Fever’ closes the album on an eccentric, trippy note. The rotary organs rotate ferociously throughout the song’s runtime of little over 7 minutes, the buried vocals wail, and the drums assume their natural role as a part of the composition that exceeds the limitations of playing a beat. The drum part breathes and changes, heaving as the psychedelic arrangement goes from one phase to the next. Truly an outstanding piece of song building.
Garage-minded music has never been for everyone. The lo-fi production sound that Brett, Stafford, Michael and Peter Laverty went for gives the music on the album a very distinctive sonic fingerprint that’s going to leave some people polarized, and most people stunned. A confident and enjoyable stride of an album, with songs that trudge along with seemingly infinite charisma, Pork Pie are on their best guise with Golden Leaf Sheets.
