Audiopile Review: In the early 2000s, P:ano was a gentle but irresistible force to be reckoned with. Formed in Coquitlam by Nicholas Krgovich (now a sophisti-pop cult figure in his own right) with his school friend Larissa ‘Kellarissa’ Loyva, the group was quickly embraced by Vancouver’s music scene. It’s no exaggeration to say P:ano’s 2002 debut album, ‘When it’s Dark and it’s Summer’ was a massive local hit. The two labels that co-released it struggled to keep the CD in print, such was demand. On the surface, it was just some youngsters venting their love of Low, Belle & Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields, Yo La Tengo, and Stereolab. But Krgovich’s pop was already prodigiously sophisti, and Loyva’s harmony vocals leant the band’s sound some deep, dark depths. They continued to make great albums with a revolving cast of local notables, before settling on the classic four-piece line-up that made their astonishing 2005 swansong, ‘Ghost Pirates Without Heads’. Almost 20 years later, that classic line-up has been reactivated for a new album, ‘ba ba ba’. While the lyrics explore those youthful days of early P:ano, this is no retread of former glories. For one thing, it’s the group’s most rocking album to date. “Rocking” is strictly relative when it comes to an act like P:ano, but ‘mikey’s new house’ really does rock in a YLT style. Furthermore, ‘ba ba ba’ legitimately contains some of Krgovich’s best songs. He’s written a lot of excellent choons, but ‘days swing’ might just be the best of them. The irresistible force that drove P:ano early on is somehow still motoring, and the band sounds quite shockingly inspired. Oh and, while we’re on the subject, this is a fantastic *sounding* record. Fresh, warm, and organic. It’s all so unexpected, and ‘ba ba ba’ is almost superfluously brilliant. We’re just happy to have these kids back. We didn’t even need them to still be so damn good. But, yeah, they remain well worth reckoning with.

Like most of life’s significant events (birth! death! a pretty sunset!), the passage of time is wild in some ways, but in others totally unremarkable: it’s a thing that just happens. All of a sudden you’re older than your doctor or the police officer on the corner, and ruminating on all the years that have piled up in between can unconsciously become some sort of strange hobby.

The sense of wistful nostalgia that wafts through Canadian pop group p:ano’s 2002 debut album ‘When It’s Dark and It’s Summer’ is also present on their new record ‘ba ba ba’ – their first release in 19 years. But this time around, the ambient sense of childhood memories and the listless melancholy of suburban teenagerdom is flash-forwarded to the concerns of middle age – basically looking back and being like “what was all that even?”

In the winter of 2023, prompted by an invitation to contribute a song to a Zum Audio 25th-Anniversary compilation, Nick Krgovich, Larissa Loyva, Justin Kellam and Julia Chirka were together again doing something oddly familiar, that in retrospect they had also done while they were shockingly young. There are recordings of p:ano rehearsals from both then and now, filled with the same giggles and sense of camaraderie – only this time the flailing and wonkiness of people in their 20s is looked on with the curiosity and tenderness of people firmly planted in their 40s and 50s. Most significantly, they’re making music simply because they enjoy each other’s company and are having a good time doing it.

In a way, this makes the self-released ‘ba ba ba’ a true example of what outsider art can be in 2024 – something made for fun, without any pressure or ambition to rejoin the wheel of the music world. This freedom also informs the music itself, which tumbled out with ease and reverently bows to the music they were blasting in Nick’s 1981 Volvo back in the early aughts.

There’s a Billy Joel album called ‘An Innocent Man’ where apparently? each song is an homage to pop music from the piano man’s childhood. It was not planned, but ‘ba ba ba’ is essentially p:ano’s take on that concept, resulting in a heartfelt and celebratory swirl of the music they loved in their formative years, leaning into the similarities to groups like Yo La Tengo, Low, Belle & Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields, or Stereolab like you would a big hug.

Nich Wilbur recorded the basic tracks to tape last November at The Unknown in Anacortes, WA, and returning to Vancouver, the group finished the album themselves in a little field house in a neighbourhood park. Old friends stopped by to contribute, many of whom also played on the early p:ano records, and here everyone was again laughing and tripping over cables and dealing with crackling headphones just like old times. The results were mixed in a few days in Toronto by Nick’s frequent collaborator Joseph Shabason.

A lot of the record is set in Coquitlam, the Vancouver suburb where Nick and Larissa formed the group while still in high school. The songs on that first album were also packed with images of their hometown but when that album came out in 2002, Coquitlam was still full of rundown mid-century strip malls and modest family homes with swaying cedar trees towering above. Some of that is still there, but a lot of it is getting crunched up and turned into high-rises with a physiotherapy clinic and Chipotle on the ground floor.

‘ba ba ba’ is made out of unwieldy observations about these kinds of changes – impressions about being alive with friends and family and loved ones from the vantage of a very different time, and filtering it all with a sense of bewilderment and gratitude for the here and now. All in its own funny way, and most notably, all for love.