What's happened is not so much a transition as it is an expansion and refinement of the band's earlier sound. What's clear is that this band has come into their own. Push-Pull have arrived. 

 

This Bloomington, Indiana band of Mikes (Mike Bridavsky, Mike Hoggatt, and Mike Notaro) have combined grandiose riffs and complex arrangements into an anthemic rock album. Their sound lies somewhere in between high-brow prog and low-brow, PBR-soaked basement punk. With Between Noise and the Indians, it seems the trio have sharpened their wit and crafted their musical skills into something unique and undeniably important - a sound which Skyscraper Magazine insists, "sounds nothing like Shellac, Big Black, or the Wipers" but which remains "bizarrely good". Their triumphant sound is challenging by nature, but never succumbs to prog's esoteric tendencies or masturbatory "time signature stuffing". Using their brains and their balls, Push-Pull manage to effortlessly shuffle time-signatures while displaying an endless supply of hooks behind the walls of aggressive noise and pummeling beats. 

 

Push-Pull released their 3 EP in late 2007 on Joyful Noise. In November 2008 Sick Room Records released their never-properly-released first album Hello Soldier and in the same month the band split wax with Prizzy Prizzy Please on the PPPPPEP. The Between Noise... album title was taken from a roughly translated Italian review praising them as "noise-rock flavored with intuitions post-punk" with "united polish madness hooks". We can only imagine that the writer was trying to communicate the band's knack for composing 15 second catchy choruses within aggressive, noisy experimental rock bookends; or their knack for connecting threads from song to song in sculpting an album that is truly more than the sum of it's parts. Any way you cut it, Between Noise and the Indians is a cohesive rock-opera of an album. Without the opera.