If someone asked you to name the most influential math rock act of the twenty-first century, there’s a relatively high chance you’d say TTNG or Delta Sleep. Obviously a few other contenders exist, but these neighboring UK bands in particular have done quite a bit with their time, and at this point their place in conversations like that feel beyond earned.
So you can imagine, or perhaps even remember, the ecstatic shock felt by the community when rumors of Pancho first surfaced. The idea felt totally natural but also potentially huge, maybe even revolutionary.
We’d already seen TTNG’s Chris Collis take massive new swings with As Living Arrows, so what could he and Glen, Delta Sleep’s guitar player, possibly be cooking up? Well, if you guessed the answer was “sweet, sweet music,” turns out you guessed correctly.
Right away you get the impression that we’re definitely getting a best of both worlds approach – Glen’s soft, warm guitar rips benevolently through the speakers and Collis’ delivers his signature stealth calculus on the drum set. Also, the bass playing is no slouch so big shout to Joe Kent for his awesome work here.
On their self-titled debut, things go by quickly, but they still take the time to unfurl into a dense, layered, and beautiful experience. There’s true sense of personality and substance being developed by the time we get to “Honey,” and a lot of it has to due with the band leaning into something slightly more jazzy than they do in their other projects. It’s not needlessly complicated atonal spew, it’s just a classy singer-songwriter flavor of jazz that really works well with emo and math rock, so ultimately everything here feels right at home.
Pancho’s self-titled debut, and indeed Pancho itself, are the definition of ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ You can definitely hear the individual parts and the obvious brilliance of how Glen and Chris fit together, but also that they got to explore something different here, and it’ll be really interesting to see how much further they push it in the future.
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