Pinback – Time-Tested Transmissions
Rob Crow is laughing at me.
We’re talking Pinback’s new set of songs, and after striking out again and again on my own interpretations, I’m drawing a blank on what the songs on the band’s new album, Information Retrieved, could possibly mean.
I can’t be too hard on myself. After all, at first listen, “Penelope” from 2001’s Blue Screen Life sounded like a love letter to a struggling significant other—it’s about a fish with “dropsy,” a condition that causes fluid buildup and usually causes death. “Walters,” which came years later on 2007’s Autumn of the Seraphs, is a little easier. It features some triumphant language about ascending above the land. It’s a sweet thought until you realize it’s about Larry Walters, a guy who strapped so many weather balloons to his lawnchair that he flew, and after finding little motivation to go on following his heighty goal, shot himself in the chest.
So, in swinging for the fences with these interpretations, this writer is getting everything wrong. Yes, there are familial references on the album (not on the songs I’m thinking), but no, “Denslow, You Idiot!” is not a nod to BASEketball’s Ted Denslow (who is called an idiot in the movie, thank you).
“Oh, that’s funny,” Crow laughs. He’s getting louder, fully validating those pre-interview jitters about whether making a BASEketball connection was ridiculous. “I think I liked BASEketball more than anyone who had anything to do with that movie, but it is not a reference to it at all.”
It’s in this moment that it’s clear. Maybe, even after almost 15 years of solid output including five full-length albums, it’s hard to nail these guys down. Song interpretations aside, it’s a no-brainer on how an audience draws these misunderstandings from the duo, which is rounded out by the inspired bass playing of Armistead Burwell Smith IV (Crow and friends call him Zach or ABSIV for short).
Smith plays bass like he had no preconceived notion of the instrument—that’s not a dig; it’s high praise in 2012, where crash courses in bass guitar mean leaning hard on root notes and basic scale patterns. Smith’s two hands and four strings practically make him a one-man band, blending a rock-solid bottom end with winding, complementary melodies. It’s almost impossible to totally pick it out and separate it from Crow’s interlaced guitar parts on record, and it’s nothing short of amazing to see come together live, looping behind the duo’s hooky, call-and-response vocals. It’s non-traditional instrumentation for songs with such hooky leanings, but then again, they’re still providing a convincing low end of the tonal spectrum (whether it comes from bass, guitar or keyboards) and stringing out beautiful melodies from all of the above. It’s practicality meeting innovation while politely giving the finger to tradition.
But maybe the crowning example of these misinterpretations is Crow’s five page-long FAQ that he’s requested every interviewer read before the interview. They’re questions that—as he puts it—he’s run out of interesting ways to answer in the last decade. It covers some stuff they’re justifiably tired of answering—Their recording techniques (they’ve notoriously recorded at home for years and have recently moved some projects to a local studio). Influences (Crow digs Captain Beefheart, Lead Belly and The Residents, whereas Smith doesn’t listen to a whole lot recreationally—but he does love Rush.) Videogame preferences (They don’t agree on much, but they do love RPGs). Political affiliations (They don’t put it in the tunes, so let’s move on). “Is it true that the song ‘Penelope’ is about a fish?” (Yes.)
But most importantly, one question they’re getting over and over again is on the group’s dynamic. “What’s their relationship like?” “How did they meet?” “Are they doing drugs together while making these songs?” It goes on.
You’d expect a collaboration that’s thrived for so long to be made of two like-minded individuals who completely gel in the studio, but that’s not really the case with these two. They paired up after a small stint as roommates in the ‘90s, when it originally didn’t occur to them to make music together. Those first collaborations were around the dawning of home recording, something that’s dictated Pinback’s creativity and songwriting since its inception. And like Smith’s bass playing, which was first showed off in San Diego’s Three Mile Pilot, the two did away with any outside influence and let the sounds and their own creativity do the talking.
“When we sat down we didn’t want to have any preconceived structure for anything,” Crow says. “So, we just sat down and went, ‘I don’t know, what do you wanna do?’ So we just sat down and tried to make a beat on [Smith’s] old Macintosh—that’s before there was the sound card and all that. And we just tried to make layers over it to try and figure out what we wanted to do. And then we would give up and go body surfing for a while. And we would do that everyday for a few days until we came up with the first song that we came up with that we liked. And from then on we came up with stuff that we liked.”