From
Pinback, a cerebral set with underlying warmth
Pinback/Aqueduct/The Dudley Corporation
Paradise, Boston, Massachusetts
May 26, 2005
by Marc Hirsh
[photo taken by Marc Hirsh]
originally published in
The Boston Globe, May
28, 2005
Most performers looking to make a connection with
their
audience tend to do so by reaching out in some way, by opening
themselves up
and extending themselves to the crowd. At the
That’s a much tougher road, but Pinback traveled it without experiencing too many bumps. The band, expanded from just Crow and bassist/keyboardist Armistead Burwell Smith IV on recordings like last year’s Summer In Abaddon (Touch and Go) to a five-piece on tour, specialized in much the same type of deliberate, abstruse songs that Modest Mouse explored on their artistic breakthrough The Lonesome Crowded West. With their spindly guitar and bass figures pushing them along, the songs were characterized by a constant undercurrent that might have seemed sinister if there wasn’t a warmth at their core.
Part of that warmth came from the prominence of
Smith’s
bass, which he played like a co-lead instrument on equal terms with
Crow’s
guitar. Eschewing standard single-note basslines, Smith approached his
instrument variously like a rhythm guitar or a bajo sexto, coaxing
multiple
notes out of it at a time. His wide-ranging rumbling combined with
Cameron
Jones’s subtly complex drumming to create a rock-solid foundation that
kept Pinback’s
songs from getting stale despite the sameness of a lot of the material.
There
were no such problems at the end of the band’s main set, which featured
the
Dubliners The Dudley Corporation started off with
a set of
pounding