“Let’s go to the fuzz tone opera” is Papal Visit’s answer to MxPx’s “Let’s go to the punk rawk show.” It’s a line buried halfway through the second side of their new album, Five Fathom Hole, but it might have stood in as the album’s overture. Five Fathom Hole is Papal Visit’s glorious ode to their medium of choice: lo-fi rock.
That warm fuzz is the unifying factor on Five Fathom Hole; it is ubiquitously and somehow comforting, as if its audio trigger for some genetically encoded memory of taking in an evening of radio programming at the foot of your grandfather’s armchair. And from there, the album descends into Papal Visit’s own particular brand of weirdness.
Imagine Five Fathom Hole as the tapas of albums. With no songs in the twenty-five song collection hitting even the three-minute mark, and several clocking in under a minute, you’re heading in several directions in very short order. Although the band have handily listed their local influences, you’d have a hard time pinning Papal Visit to nearly any comparison here, with perhaps the exception of the jangle of guitar and synth on “False Flag” bearing a resemblance to New Order’s “Ceremony.” While Papal Visit may defy comparison, to paraphrase the words of Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it.
With an impressive musical pedigree that spans back two decades, the core members of which include Adam Mowery and Pierre Cormier (both formerly of Wooden Wives), Chris Braydon and Jason Ogden (Penny Blacks), and Geoffrey Smith (Tooth & the Fang), there is an entire community that has been interwoven into this album on some level. Dan Boyer, Dan Chamberlain, Jud Crandall, Corey Isenor, Alex Keleher, Sadie, and the ever-present Adam Kierstead, have all made their own contributions to Five Fathom Hole. The album draws widely from bandmates and side-project—the average track length of a brisk minute of a half actually lends itself to incorporating such a massive revolving ensemble—and encapsulating a scene in the process. Rather than finding familiar sounds within Five Fathom Hole, it’s more accurate to say that Papal Visit has defined the sound of a whole city.
For me, Papal Visit epitomizes the sound of Saint John. Having, at one point, lived with the band’s jam space literally sharing an alleyway with my apartment, that sounds—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Adam Mowery’s distinctive vocals—provided the soundtrack to my life and a good portion of the neighbourhood as well. More familiar with hearing it reverberated against brick and muffled through walls, the warm lo-fi fuzz found on the album is basically a true-to-life experience as I remember it. It is a sound that is inherently punk in nature, if not in sound—held together with bits of electrical tape, safety pins and a passion that means they’ll squeeze an album out of a tin can if that’s what it’s going to take.
Short and sweet as these songs may be, the album still has some clear stand-out singles; the previously released “The Opposite Heart” and “Where Do They Swim?” both lean as far in the direction of pop as the album gets, the heavy bends of “Tootsie Pop” veers briefly into the nearest grounds of Donovan’s mantric brand of psychedelic pop, while the aforementioned “False Flag” brings us up a couple of decades by gently grazing at the edges of New Wave. And through it all is that warm tone coating everything like a delicious sugar glaze. It’s a peculiar quality to find yourself admiring in an album and yet, somehow, Papal Visit makes it work like it’s their special ingredient that is holding together an eclectic mix and moves so fast that it’s best to take it as a whole. Whatever you’re into, you’ll almost inevitably find something you’ll like about it in the next minute or five.
Papal Visit’s Five Fathom Hole was released on November 12, 2021, via Monopolized Records, giving the band their vinyl debut (in both orange and green, no less). Five Fathom Hole can be ordered online via Bandcamp.