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Pinback formed in 1998 when Rob Crow, left, and Armistead Burwell “Zach” Smith IV took a break from their other bands.
Courtesy Drew Reynolds
Pinback’s pop is built to challenge
By Ben Salmon / The Bulletin
Published: February 08. 2008 4:00AM PSTRob Crow’s hard drive recently crashed, and if you know who Rob Crow is, you know he’s distraught.
“I was almost done with the last Thingy album and two new Goblin Cock albums, and I was heavy into the new Optiganally Yours album when my hard drive died and I lost everything, so I’m starting over,” Crow said in a recent telephone interview from his home in San Diego. “It’s hard for me to talk about.”
Thingy? Goblin Cock? Optiganally Yours? Fair questions.
These are just three of the lesser-known projects of Crow, a hyper-prolific pop-rock songwriting machine and half of Pinback, which will perform Wednesday in Bend (see “If You Go”). Pinback, with it’s big-indie record deal (Touch & Go) and broad critical praise, helps fund all Crow’s side bands, he said.
“(Pinback) makes what little money I do make so I can do all the other bands that I do,” Crow said. “It’s the mothership and everything else is a satellite, sort of. Maybe not conceptually or contextually, but as far as being able to do it monetarily, it’s the one.”
Crow’s stylistic palette is as (or more) impressive than his inexhaustible creative output. Over the last 15 years, the guy’s been involved in nearly 20 bands (depending on what you count as a band), ranging from hardcore punk (Alpha Males) and doom metal (Goblin Cock) to glitchy electronica (Aspects Of Physics) and the aforementioned Optiganally Yours, based on a toy organ made in the 1970s.
But it’s bubbly, precise guitar-based pop-rock that Crow does best, and Pinback is the picture of that; the band’s music is light and airy, featuring pretty melodies but also dense rhythms and inscrutable lyrics. It’s complex, yet simple. Paradoxical pop, if you will.
That’s by design. Crow, along with his Pinback partner Armistead Burwell Smith IV (aka Zach), delights in challenging the listening public to stretch its ear, he said. There’s a subversive element to Pinback and all his bands, “like really good children’s programming where children are learning by accident,” Crow said.
“We want to do music that is accidentally innovative, where people don’t realize that their subconscious is being changed just enough to want to listen to something more complicated,” he said. “It is actually a thing I try to do. It sounds like the stupidest thing ever (and) totally conceited to try to pretend that I could pull something like that off, but it’s what I’m always trying to do anyway, whether I do it or not.”
That kind of modesty runs through just about everything Crow says, particularly when asked about the legions of fans who call him a genius on his MySpace profile. (“If I’m a genius, then boy, the human race is in trouble.”)
But the fact is that rock music needs guys like Crow out there pushing buttons and expanding horizons, and if they’re gifted at making toe-tapping music as their vehicle, all the better.
“Every time I do something, I always have a secret hope that a lot of people will enjoy it because I’m always trying to do something different and new, with the hope that … the attitudes toward what is considered justified music more fits what mine is,” he said with a laugh. “How can I make it so everyone wants to listen to Captain Beefheart instead of The Beatles? That’s pretty much my secret agenda.”
Ben Salmon can be reached at 383-0377 or bsalmon@bendbulletin.com.
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