Pettaluck - Pan

​Pettaluck

Pan
self-released; 2025

TOP ALBUM

By Jamie Funk
​

From a modest shed in Southend-on-Sea, Emma Reed, under the moniker Pettaluck, assembles a collection of songs with Pan that feel stitched together from the wreckage and wonder of recent years. Written in the shadow of parenthood, illness, and the isolating quiet of COVID, her latest project seeks warmth and communion—but with a sense of humor about how messy both can be. Pulling from the anarchic energy of Rocket From the Crypt, the maximalism of Big Lad, and the textural oddities of Pistakun, Reed builds on the skeletal sound of Pass, her debut, expanding into fuller, woodwind-soaked arrangements that feel at once chaotic and strangely comforting.

Throughout Pan, Reed toys with the thresholds where the ordinary tips into the surreal. She drifts between ambient meditations ("Divine"), hyperactive chill-Gabber ("Baby Blue"), and chaotic nursery rhymes scored with flutes and splintered percussion ("Snake Oil"). There's even a warped return to "Into the Woods," a song first recorded with her earlier band Lost Harbours, now recast through the album’s melted, hallucinatory lens.

Opening with "Pan," Reed embraces total dissonance, as if daring melody to find its way through the noise. Flutes squeal, drums churn through heavy filters, and chaos reigns. It’s bracing and it feels like no one involved cares about making it palatable, which is exactly the point. "Hot Coffee" follows, a wild, spiraling piece that lands somewhere between Joanna Newsom’s fey eccentricity and a dream slowly dissolving at the edges. Instruments appear, warp, and collapse into each other; the whole thing sounds like it’s melting, and it’s glorious.

"Baby Blue" is a standout, channeling a grindcore-like intensity before careening off into vertigo-inducing oblivion. That same sense of collapse continues into "Snake Oil," where Pettaluck weaponizes woodwinds and chaos like blunt instruments. "Summer Tonight" offers a brief reprieve, its folksy guitars and wheezing harmonica evoking the delicate hush of Vashti Bunyan but even here, the peace is fleeting, swallowed by another swirling descent into nightmare territory.

By the time "Into the Woods" resurfaces, the album has fully embraced its bad-trip aesthetic: overlapping vocals bleed into each other, warped and alien. "Dungeness" goes even further inward, blending cryptic spoken word fragments with a haze of unidentifiable sounds. Closer "Divine" stretches to nearly ten minutes, offering brief glimpses of serenity and it's like finding a clear pool of water after trekking through a dreamscape of distortion. Singing bowl textures and gentle drones provide a final, satisfying exhale.

Pettaluck’s latest is an absolute gem: disorienting, dissonant, and defiantly beautiful. It's a rare album that demands to be experienced in full, its strange logic revealing itself only when you surrender to the chaos.

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