It's a Tuesday, and P:ano have released their first album in 19 years. The day of the week is significant because, the last time the group put out an album, New Music Friday didn't exist yet and the industry standard was to release on Tuesdays.
That sense of nostalgia courses through every note of ba ba ba. While throwback reunion albums are hardly unusual these days, ba ba ba is unique because it's not trying to recapture the glory of youth; rather, it's a bittersweet reflection on nostalgia itself, casting a wistful eye back in time, name-checking landmarks from the Vancouver suburb Coquitlam where the bandmates grew up.
"Doing the things that I might have done / So mindlessly when I was young," Nicholas Krgovich whispers in the opening bars of lead single "a bit of coquitlam," perfectly articulating the album's misty-eyed "youth is wasted on the young" perspective. The twee indie pop ditty "mariko" is a touching account of a friendship that has weathered the changes of life, and it ends with an image as vivid as a film: "With your baby, a happy potato / In the high chair at the kitchen table / Now I'm holding the dog under one arm / And waving until I can't see your car anymore."
ba ba ba sounds almost nothing the cabaret pop of the band's original run. Instead, songs like "a bit of coquitlam" and "what was i thinking" sound more like the tender soft rock and R&B that Krgovich has been making throughout his solo career. The echoing trumpet on the fuzzy "old shoe" is pure Kaputt — which isn't a coincidence, since it's played by Destroyer's JP Carter as well as mixed by the group's Joseph Shabason, a frequent collaborator with Krgovich.
Elsewhere, they throw back to formative influences from their youth: they evoke Belle and Sebastian at both their most electrified ("mikey's new house") and their most sensitive ("leaving the salon," sung by Larissa Loyva a.k.a. Kellarissa), while "mariko" is a classic Magnetic Fields toe-tapper.
It all comes together beautifully on closer "poco trail", as Krgovich repeats what's essentially the project's thesis: "What's done and undone and could use doing again." Immediately after that, he croons a wordless melody directly taken from Stereolab's "Metronomic Underground," past and present colliding in bittersweet reverie.