Saturday Night: Pinback Sorts Through the Chaos at Bottom of the Hill

Beardo!: Pinback at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday night.

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Pinback

JP Incorporated
January 1, 2011

@ Bottom of the Hill

Better than: Not distracting one's self from a seething hangover.

Sometimes it sounds like Pinback's Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV are singing completely different songs, one of them meditatively chanting in spirals, the other waxing in a seemingly dissimilative key and meter, one that's oblong and alien. It's counterintuitive stuff, but a bridge here and a plot twist there -- and voila! The vocal arrangements come together like a swirl cone's peak. This is when Pinback can be sublime in the most un-Sublime way.

The San Diego-based band, which started out as something of an answer to the beachy reggae-rock of late '90s SoCal, has evolved into one of the more reliable outfits on the West Coast, steady on the touring and recording fronts since 1999. Crow and Smith have struck modest gains on each album since This is a Pinback CD, onward to the slow-pop of Blue Screen Life, the more complex arrangements of 2004's Summer in Abaddon, and 2007 release Autumn of the Seraphs. And here they were in 2011, playing in the still-decked halls of Bottom of the Hill on New Year's Day, remnants of the previous night's festivities a stark contrast to the no-frills aesthetics of the sample-free, electronics-wary five-piece onstage.

The band's sound revolves around the virtuoso bass scheming of Smith, but the Venn diagramming vocal dynamics of both main members are the conspicuous focus of the live show. Crow, a Jack Black look-a-lot-alike -- a guy you'd expect to find in a comic book shop debating theories of the time-space continuum -- sings with his face, wincing to hit higher notes, closing his eyes for expressive effect, and bending his cheeks for inflections unexpected. It's an emo cry at times, but without the actual crying. Smith plays the foil effortlessly -- soft-spoken, all business, and usually supplying the backing vocals. (Drummer Chris Prescott pushes the clever Pinback percussive element forward, and keyboardists/guitarists Braden Diotte and Erik Hoversten flank Crow and Smith, trying to stay out of their way for the most part.)