Pitty Sing + South + Metric

Pitty Sing + South + Metric


Pitty Sing
South

This was a goldilocks night: the openers Pitty Sing were far too rough to be good, South was far too polished to matter, but Metric was perfect. In fact I pity the fool forced to sit, or even worse stand, through Pitty Sing’s muscular re-interpretation of a John Hughes soundtrack. That said, it is said that you shouldn’t say anything unless you can say something nice. But the Beatles already did 60 seconds of silence. So stand back. By the second song, the ooh-hoos were flying faster than a flock of seagulls. Howling them was Paul Holmes, a singer who was more Stephan Jenkins or Mark McGrath than Morrisey or Richard Butler. And I don’t mean voice. This guy is stacked. But, not like john — more top heavy. Just like Jenkins, who I used to see at the gym in San Francisco, sweating as he pumped up his deltoids and did curls for the gurls. But that has already been covered. Our entertainment for the evening was sweating it out as he tried to stay in key whenever he held a note longer than a beat or two. In between these soaring and more than sometimes sour vocals, he occasionally hacked away at a guitar, other times eschewing the singer-songwriter put on in favor of a practiced but not perfected front man act. However the front man put- on was a cut above what the backing offered up. The seemingly superfluous keyboard generally coaxed sub-par sounds out of his gear. Initially I had felt sorry for him: maybe the engineer didn’t know how to do sound for keyboard. But the other two bands had keyboards, and they sounded great. So that wasn’t it. Things only got worse (better?) when he hunched his shoulders, stretched his arms out, hung his head, and postured. He couldn’t stop mugging like a kid playing in his first college band. He really should have bought himself some rock star lessons out of his advance. Then there was that pinch-hitter, the bassist. He took the innocuous award, which in this crowd was a good thing. He seemed to take a more blue-collar approach; show up, play the songs, move a little, and then punch out. It truly was refreshing. Then there was the drummer. He was hidden deep behind hid kit, tucked away under headphone monitors, never looking up to see where the rest of the band was at in a particular song. A relationship among band members like that is never good. Unless you’re in the studio, which actually is a place Pitty Sing sounds pretty OK. Unfortunately that’s not where we were. Thankfully, Pitty Sing were the openers, so just as I began to realize that they had actually been playing a bunch of songs that were had just blended together, they were wrapping up. Pitty Sing puts together a lot of hot points, but they don’t even come close to turning them into a starry constellation. They have the ’80s thing, the pin-up singer thing, and the keyboard thing. I’m sure there are even a few other things that I left out. But that’s because a good band is not a shopping list, they are a good band. And ladies and gentleman, Pitty Sing is a live band. They break no new ground and do a poor job revisiting their painfully apparent source material. The Strokes may not be the most original act, but at least they are a clever and well-executed version of something you’ve already heard. There are murmurs in Pitty Sing of revisiting the New Romantics of the ’80s, but there is none of the delicate texture. Pitty Sing rocks out and swaggers around. They don’t preen and dress up. If you must hear Pitty Sing, do yourself a favor and make sure that’s all there is to it. Get the CD. It’s not bad. It’s even listenable. But steer clear of the reconstituted version. You’ll thank me later.