Information Retrieved

In 2009 Pinback said their next album would come out on Temporary Residence the following year. It arrived on October 16, 2012, five years after Autumn of the Seraphs, and Rob Crow’s explanation was plain: “we kind of took five years to write the record”. In that time Zach Smith put out an album with his other band, Three Mile Pilot, Smith had his first child and Crow two more, the label they had been on went under, and they lost a band member to cancer, which Crow would not discuss. Information Retrieved is the San Diego duo’s fifth album, and fourteen years on it is still their most recent.

They made it themselves. The sleeve says Pinback wrote, performed, recorded and mixed it at Smith’s house, Crow’s house and S.D.R.L. in San Diego, with no producer credited. Both of them sing and play guitar and keyboards; Smith plays bass, and Crow is also credited with drums. Chris Prescott drums on eight of the ten songs, Anton and Lewis Patzner add violin and cello to “True North”, and the San Diego engineer Ben Moore remixed four tracks with the band. Two songs went out early, on 7-inch singles in 2011: “Sherman” for Record Store Day in April and “True North” in November. Crow said the artwork, which pairs Daniel Danger’s illustrations with his own collage, hides “all sorts of hidden things”, including video games.

“Proceed to Memory” opens the album and was the first single, premiered by Rolling Stone in August 2012. Crow called it “another in a long line of songs about mortality”, and several critics, even unfriendly ones, heard his voice pushed harder here than anywhere else on the record. “His Phase”, the second single, runs on Smith’s bass, which Paste described as carrying the beat and the melody at once, and Pitchfork pointed to its handclapped breakdown. The BBC read “True North” as an end-of-the-world song, with the earth’s crust flaking off and the time zones shifting, and PopMatters noted its low strings and palm-muted guitar. The BBC also picked out a line in “Drawstring” about the sun burning out. “Diminished” is led by piano, and PopMatters described it rising to a crescendo around a line about how hard it is to have a nice day.

“Sherman” got a video on release day, directed by Matt Hoyt. It starts from Planeta Bur, a 1962 Soviet science-fiction film that Roger Corman later recut into two American B-movies. Crow mashed all three into visuals for the tour, then he and Hoyt used that as the frame for a new scenario with Crow and Smith landing on a prehistoric planet, every effect done in camera. “It had everything!” Crow told Wired of the original. The closer, “Sediment”, is the longest track at 4:56; Paste likened it to arena rock, by Pinback’s standards.

The reviews were mostly favourable, with a Metacritic average of 72, and they split over the same quality. Paste gave it 8 out of 10 for its deliberate, stripped-down arrangements, the BBC called it a “downbeat delight” about the information age and the end of the world, and PopMatters, at 7 out of 10, heard a summation of their career. Pitchfork, at 6.8, found the consistency both the appeal and the limit. The A.V. Club gave it a B− and missed Smith’s usual counterpoint, and Consequence of Sound, at 1.5 out of 5, found it forgettable. The album reached number 71 on the Billboard 200, two places lower than Autumn of the Seraphs had.

Crow summed up the band’s position in seven words: “We sound like what we sound like.” That is the case for the album and its ceiling. Two people who know their method made it, largely at home, over five years, and it shows in the details critics kept noting: the strings on “True North”, the bass under “His Phase”, a mortality song with Crow at full voice. Between the opener and the closing pair of “Denslow, You Idiot!” and “Sediment”, which the A.V. Club and Paste both singled out, it settles into the mid-tempo PopMatters noted. Pitchfork suggested it might be a newcomer’s favourite Pinback record, and that is the right way in. In 2025 Temporary Residence reissued it on dark blue vinyl, 2,000 copies.