Friday, October 13, 2017

Cassette Review: Pinact " The Part That No One Knows" (Kanine Records)


I was sent a link to listen to this album.   I streamed it at first, enjoyed it within the first few seconds, so then as my process tends to dictate I downloaded it and listened to it a number of times before looking it up, finding it on Bandcamp and realizing there was a cassette for it.    I don't think anyone will quite understand how much joy it brings me to find new music I enjoy and then realize it is also on cassette.   If this music was a person, that would make us BFFs right away. 

One of the biggest problems with music today is that bands don't want to be original anymore.   Look at the lazy formula Hollywoo has for doing remakes and reboots.    There is a seemingly endless number of bands out there (Though that number must end somewhere, right?) from which you could pull influences and create new sounds but too many artists seem content with doing what worked for those who came before them.  Pinact does not have this problem.   Pinact is a hard band to describe.

You see, on one hand, this is fuzzy.   Whenever I hear something fuzzy like this my mind goes straight to Weezer as a reference though that might not always be the best example it's still the first I typically reach.   (And I find myself referencing Weezer a lot lately as well and for the record I only ever really got into their first two albums, which is another story for another time)   The thing is, with this what I could call the Weezer sound there is also something like "Dude Ranch" era Blink 182.

I'm not a historian when it comes to Blink 182 but I was in my teens when "Dude Ranch" came out and as such I always tend to think of the album as being for the youth in that sense.   Now, if you can follow my timeline here, I actually listened to Weezer before Blink 182 (Someone do a timeline check on that please?) but somehow having that Weezer influence on this makes it feel like a more mature "Dude Ranch" era Blink 182.   In some ways, it feels like the type of album a grown up Blink 182 would make but at the same time it completely does not.

The lack of originality in music is something that I think is on the surface and just jumps out at anyone who listens to music.   Put on the radio and see how many songs sound the same to you but are by "totally different artists".    The biggest problem I have with modern music is hidden underneath all of that and it is the lyrical content.   Say what you want about grunge but at least Nirvana, for example, brought us some meaningful lyrics (or at least memorable)   Bands don't seem to care about that anymore.   They seem to follow a cookie cutter formula for words... except for Pinact.

While most bands want to try and rewrite the same love song over and over again, Pinact has songs with lines like "disguise your mental health", as they tend to touch on topics which a lot of other songs don't but it's just not... In the nicest way possible I want to say that a lot of lyrics from bands- regardless of how old they might be when written- feel like high school drama.   Pinact, through their lyrics, show that there is life after high school, something which I feel, again, most bands up until now have not done.    I'm also particularly partial to the line "I think it's finally time I did something for myself".

If you're like me and tend to enjoy music of all genres but feel like that typical rock sound in a verse/chorus/verse way lacks a certain something in both the music itself and the lyrics well then Pinact might be the most well-rounded band you will ever hear and this really is bigger than genres because in a lot of ways it's even bigger than music on a whole.


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