On 'Blue Rev,' Alvvays finds euphoria in noise
It takes just six seconds into the first song on its latest album for Alvvays to pull a new trick out of its sleeve. For a moment, "Pharmacist" feels like what it is: a long-awaited reunion with these Canadian noise pop purveyors on their small-town home turf, a few muted synth notes and a preset drum machine tick-tocking while Molly Rankin sighs, "I know you're back, I saw your sister at..." right up until the moment that a swirl of noise rises in the mix to meet and nearly envelop her voice and you can barely make out a syllable.
A shift of emphasis from text to texture could be purely aesthetic — a snarl of, deploy distortion with the same care that Rankin has always written lyrics. These are 14 zippy songs that echo in your brain long after they end, largely thanks to the group's ability to repeatedly knock reliable song machinery into a woozy disequilibrium.
