PTS - Campaign

The album Campaign from Dutch band PTS was far and away the most outstanding new CD I had listened to for some time. Very much in your face, its raw unbridled passion reaches right down into the centre of my heart with enthralling sensuality and sensitivity. Its textures are replete with subtle touches which easily withstand the loud playing that best suits its direct, bombastic style. Had this come out somewhere around 1973 it might easily have been a massive hit.

Lead vocalist and chief inspiration Marco de Haan has a very distinctive and effective vocal style which he combines with being the band’s drummer. Ron van Kruistum projects piercing moods from the guitar, often in an interplay with Simon Veenhuis on keyboards. But part-time sax player Erwin Werring makes perhaps the biggest impact of all and it is his playing that makes Walk With Me one of the most outstanding tracks on the album. Bass is provided by Dario Pozderski, and Danielle van Es and others provide female backing vocals.

The compositions might perhaps have done with being a little bit more complex, but generally the listener’s interest is maintained by the sheer pace at which things unfold and the intensity and commitment of the playing.

A concept album, Campaign is outwardly about war and the grim life of being a plain soldier at the bottom of the command chain. But this concept is used as a stunningly brilliant metaphor for its real subject matter, the rough-and-tumble of life and a guy who succumbs in the end after finally accumulating a lethal number of knocks.

Walk With Me, for example, is about a guy seriously torn between whether to continue into a relationship or to remain on his own. His torrid thoughts are presented in the lyrics:

Inside, it boils and it burns
It twists, and it turns
It rattles and it shakes
It all collides and breaks
I can’t decide which way to go...

Meanwhile the musicians combine perfectly to evoke precisely the right mood for the passage, as they do with consummate skill throughout the entire album.

Now a very interesting project might be to shoot a film to accompany this music...