Pilot

When The Day has Broken (Tim/Kerr)
by Jon Sarre

Pop music affects the brain kinda like an opiate. When you’re feeling down, you can turn on the radio and escape to Strawberry Fields or the Hotel California or a champagne supernova in the sky and be temporarily transferred from your shit job, your broken car and whatever else your life lacks. Since pop music basically exists to sell advertising time on the radio waves, it pretty much has to be positive. Unhappy people are simply a lousy market (unless your product is liquor or cigarettes). Where do you think the name “Great Depression” comes from?

So if Pilot‘s new record breaks big, will the economy collapse? For a band with such pronounced pop leanings, ex-Dharma Bum Jeremy Wilson and co. are downright gloomy. When the Day Has Broken is packed with bitterness, loathing and an oddly hook-laden anthemic quality that really can’t help but appeal to the Pearl Jam generation.

It’s the instrumental breaks that really push this record over the top. For pretty much the first half of this disc, Richard Stuverud’s drums and Patrick Gundran’s guitar threaten to overwhelm everything else. On “Full of Sunshine (This Ain’t the Day),” Wilson sounds like he wants to purge himself of everything, to scream, to throw everything up, but before he can, all the instruments rise up around him and he drowns in the feedback, his voice is nearly obliterated.

The track, “When the Day Has Broken,” is all wasted-at-4:00-AM despair. The day is finally over and there’s nothing but flickering TV static, an empty bottle and an inevitable hang-over. Pilot is definitely not the band to cheer you up, but they’re realistic, a rare commodity in the pop marketplace.