Pinback’s Armistead Burwell ‘Zach’ Smith IV and Rob Crow have been busy. Three Mile Pilot (for which Zach plays bass and sings) reunited after over ten years and released new record The Inevitable Past Is The Future Forgotten, Systems Officer (Smith’s solo project) debut album Underslept also came out last year, and Rob Crow just released new LP He Thinks He’s People, not to mention other projects they’ve been involved with. No wonder Information Retrieved, the long waited album Pinback first announced they were working on in April 2009, hasn’t come out yet and probably won’t ‘til early 2012. But thankfully in the meantime Crow & Smith released two album tasters in the form of 7″ EP’s (Information Retrieved Pt A on Record Store Day last April, and Information Retrieved Pt B on Black Friday) and more importantly they’ve been touring on and off since April.
After over two years, Pinback finally came back to London to play to a sparse but totally devotional audience at the University’s Union on Tuesday the 29th of November. Taking the stage as a trio with drummer Chris Prescott, they inevitably had to rely on some pre-recorded elements, but they still managed to create a dense and satisfying sound. Pinback are an unconventional formation: Crow and Smith share vocals duties and Crow’s guitar sometimes acts more as a rhythm instrument leaving the melody to Smith’s bass. Live, they’ve improved considerably with a sharper and more direct vocal delivery and a much heavier rhythm section. They also added some visual effects mainly relying on a backdrop where anything from classic movies, to the band’s promo videos, to funny sketches that were projected. There still wasn’t too much interaction with the audience though, letting their purely awesome music speak for itself. It’s funny to notice that while Smith was only drinking water, Crow had a customized mic stand with a drink holder where he kept replacing bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.
Opening their set with “Tres” (from 2001’s Blue Screen Life) with Zach on keyboards, they played for almost two hours (slightly beyond curfew), drawing from all their albums, even performing “Loro” from debut album This is a Pinback CD (released in 1999) and “B” from the 2003’s Offcell EP. They mainly played songs from latest record Autumn of the Seraphs (QRO review) and 2004’s Summer in Abaddon, but Blue Screen Life‘s “Penelope”, “Your Sickness”, “Boo” and “Prog” were among the most warmly welcome moments of the night. Other highlights were “Good to Sea”, that with its hypnotizing catchiness saw the crowd dancing like crazy and singing along very loudly, while the promo video was projected in the background of the stage, “Fortress” during which Crow went straight into the crowd before jumping back on stage to perform some bouncy (almost acrobatic) dance moves, and personal favourites “Devil You Know” and “From Nothing to Nowhere”, with which they concluded the first half of the set. New song “Sherman” (that was released as A-Side of the Information Retrieved Pt A EP) was also warmly greeted by some devoted fans. The encore saw Smith skillfully switching from keyboards to bass guitar for the beautiful “Sender”, before Pinback concluded their show with “AFK”.
Set List
Non-Photo Blue
