Pegg - Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks Pegg

Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks—known colloquially as Presque Tout—is a new extended play featuring three pieces written by Pegg’s Xander Duell and Van Dyke Parks. With vocals and piano from the former and string arrangements for a quintet written by the latter, its existence is a product of a symbiotic relationship: each half improving the other, trusting the process, and reaping the rewards. A towering and wonderful three-song suite as puzzling as its creators. Thirteen-minute opener “Baseball Season” will confound anyone lucky to have experienced Pegg’s self-titled album from 2024, and what Gold Flake Paint described as its “classic-NYC-indie-rock heartbeat.” The first movement serves as a playful dance between vocals and strings, nothing more, with the violins curling upwards at the same time Duell sings “now” during “I ain’t gonna be tarred and feathered nowwwww / That’s your job, honey!” Meanwhile, Johnson’s treatments to the mix become more pronounced, eventually giving way to an ethereal second movement, equally pastoral and post-apocalyptic. Van Dyke Parks’ percussive arrangements on “Madre de Dios” blur the lines between classical and showtune, with Duell bridging the gap at “I know it feels like a big down.” “No Dice” is the sole composition to have seen the light of day before on Pegg’s self-titled 2024 debut, but only its psychedelia remains on Presque Tout, greatly reimagined from soulful rocker to baroque balladry. “What we created was a new thing altogether,” says Duell. “Some kind of American alchemical glam decay that means something significant but we don’t know what. All we know is we think we opened a hitherto undiscovered door.” Pegg and Van Dyke Parks now invite you to walk through that door to experience Presque Tout, or almost everything.