Beating Back the Claws of the Cold

For all there is to be said about the power of the present in the endlessly cannibalizing tradition of pop music, it’s often the uncanny intangibility of timelessness that so separates the wheat from the chaff—a music aware of both the past and present, and yet discernibly apart from either moment in time. It is a tightrope tread by many, and often with perilous consequence. And yet, in the most literal sense of the word, timelessness is the very currency Seattle’s The Pica Beats make their stock in trade: that is, a sound both of and apart from our time.