- One of the best things to happen to someone who’s forced to listen to music all the damn time is to hear something go somewhere completely different from where you expected it to, different and good.
Popular music isn’t built to deliver too many surprises. It’s supposed to be simple and relatable, right? Even when it tries not to be, well, the building blocks are so basic they kinda make it difficult. It’s like building the Millenium Falcon out of Lego: sure, you can do it, but will you? Will you? If it’s a problem for jaded music fanciers, tired of listening to the same thing over and again, it’s at least as bad for the musicians themselves, who have to play the same small set of songs to adoring fans, over and over. Sure, those fans smile politely while you play your new stuff, but they really just want to hear that classic one you did, from six years ago. You know the one?
Enter the humble side-project, the outlet for all the things you’re not allowed to do in your main gig. So much is the origin story of The PBs. I’m pretty sure most of them hail from indie-post-rock-pop mopers, wolver where their sense of humor, along with a whole bunch of musical styles they were keen to try never really got a look in. Out they all come on their debut EP, My Actual Dad. Kicking off with the A-sides Existential Chrystler and advance single Anicone which deliver stylistic shotgun blasts of garage, punk and indie-pop. It doesn’t break the mould and there’s been a lot of that stuff in the last decade, but the PB’s frontman Sam Hodgkinson has a sort of a grinning, broken Mick Jones kind of appeal that really clinches the deal, almost to the point where you might think this is the sound they should’ve been pursuing all along.
As quickly as it arrives, it’s gone and the back half of this little EP slides into … emo, of all things! If that doesn’t seem like enough of a change-of-pace from po-faced post-rocking, well, noted, but the key to both EFS and Hellementary is for all that upswell of emotion they maintain a winningly breezily, punkily loose and wryly grinning quality that makes it impossible to ever be dragged down into the dumps. Honestly it’s hard not to smile like an idiot as Hellementary takes lyrics that might as well be from a Ramones or Alice Cooper and turn them into a tear-soaked Smith Street weeper.
Sometimes you’ve pent up everything and you just need to let it out and move on. Sometimes, however, you let it out and realise it’s what you should have said right from the beginning and it makes everything different. The PBs might have intended to be throwaway, to let off steam -it’s kinda in the name, innit?- but now they’re out there and maybe everything’s different and maybe that’s a really good thing.
- Chris Cobcroft.