Pavo Pavo

★★★ Mystery Hour BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP

Arty NY duo’s second feeds on wobbly internal dynamic.

Pavo Pavo’s core members Eliza Bagg and Oliver Hill attended Yale School of Music and were in the folk-ish Plume Giant. Until recording their second Pavo Pavo album Mystery Hour, they were a couple. Intimations of the nature of their sundered relationship run throughout in titles like Close To Your Ego, Mon Cheri and The Other Half. While surprising the album was made after the relationship’s termination, musically it builds on predecessor Young Narrator In The Breakers’ admixture of Beach Boys’ Smile-isms and a shoegazing mist by adding a new rockiness, encapsulated by opening cut Mystery Hour which sets-off an insistent guitar against Bagg’s seraphic voice: as if Beach House were tackling a stadium anthem. An electro-edged nerviness also surfaces but, overall, the fresh stylistic excursions result in an album which, fittingly considering its backstory, does not quite hang together.