Photo courtesy pretendsurprise.bandcamp.com
During the Hopscotch Music Festival, I stopped at the venue Deep South, where five bands were playing.
The audience was miserably small.
Some of the band members were lingering around after their shows and others were waiting in the pit for their turn to perform.
I have never been in a setting where the actual audience and the artists were so intimate.
At an arm’s length from the musicians, I could reach out, tap on his or her shoulder, and say: “Hey dude, great show!”
I actualy asked a guy who looked like he could’ve been a vocalist whether he was going to perform.
“Yes, unfortunately,” he replied.
The band that brought me to Deep South, Pretend Surprise, is based in Wilmington, N.C. and only has one EP, Butcher It. The recording was released on July 15 through Bandcamp.
I did not expect they would have great music when I first discovered the band. However, in the opener “Eyes for Stranger,” the drummer surprised me by his powerful drumbeats, and the song got real during the interlude.
The vocalist sang: “I didn’t see the danger, I think I saw my baby making eyes for strangers.”
With the languid yet forceful drumbeats enclosing the vocal, I was seized by whatever the eminent “danger” was.
Their third song “Comeback” is hard to define, because the style switches back and forth with mellow rock and experimental alternative.
This is exemplified when the vocalist twice delivered “… when I see you beautiful as always,” once during the cathartic alternative part, the other during the conceding rock part.
The rest of album is just as powerful and as full of surprises.
Unfortunately, their live performance wasn’t as good as their studio EP. The vocals were not stable, and largely did not synchronize with the instruments.
But the second song they performed was so good that I felt an insuppressible urge to take out my phone and record a bit of it.
Later, I went through all of their songs and YouTube videos trying to find that tune, but it’s nowhere to be found. The fleeting, wondrous gorgeousness was gone forever, and I was left tormented by the pain of not being able to hear it again.
I remembered the song started out with intense synth-pop like drumbeats that made me want to stomp the floor. Then the rest of the instruments slowly joined the drumming noise, building up to the point where the vocal came in.
There were glittering, shimmering guitar sounds that made me think of Modest Mouse, and the final chorus reminded me of The Temper Trap’s “Love Lost,” delivered with the same kind of emotional outburst. The song was a bizarre yet beautiful concoction that seemingly came from a master producer, and that distinguished the band from mediocrity.
In the end, I just felt a need to recover from the desperation and yearning that the song had portrayed.