Review: Panthalassa Panthalassa

I was driving east on the open stretch of I-10 approaching the spillway listening to Panthalassa’s self-titled debut when a rainstorm approached and blinded me, momentarily receding and then coming on strong again. This raging torrent is the best way to describe Panthalassa’s contribution to the panoply of Baton Rouge instrumental rock bands. Whether the band is named for the Greek concept of there being a vast global ocean or the boxed set of Miles Davis’s early 1970s fusion excesses is unclear, but there is a little of both in the band’s sound. “A Zero Friction Environment” patters in with echoing guitars that slowly invite the first of many sonic deluges on this record. “Become the Conductor” is a riff stretched to the point of being threadbare, exposing a skeleton made of equal parts the Ventures and Fugazi.

My favorite song on this EP is the less turbulent “Drizzly Bear”—jazz chords drifting loose in tranquility that is gradually swept up into blasts of sound. As I drove through the storm, I kept turning the volume up, just to test if there was a correlation between the rain and music, and though I’m not saying there is, just as the distortion bled away from the end of “Let Slip the Dogs of War,” the clouds began to clear. myspace.com/panthalassabr

Essential tracks: “Drizzly Bear,” “A Zero Friction Environment”

Recommended if you like: Pelican, Isis, flash floods