PEARLS AND BRASS – THE INDIAN TOWER
– 2005 (US) vintage hard rock/heavy blues/stoner rock
![[pearls2.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_KcJj6wN1MA4/Rv0k0q9QS4I/AAAAAAAABD4/Ep7Wu0ZKk5w/s1600/pearls2.jpg)
Randy Huth (guitar)
Joel Winter (bass)
Josh Martin (drums)
2 No Stone 3:30
3 The Face of God 4:13
4 Black Rock Man 5:42
5 The Mirror 3:56
6 I Learn the Hard Way 2:41
7 Pray for Sound 6:29
8 The Boy of the Willow Tree 3:11
9 Wake in the Morning 5:28
10 Beneath the Earth 6:30
11 Away the Mirrors 4:05
Sometimes it’s important to just ‘rock out’; a concept that Drag City’s Pearls & Brass clearly understand well. The album begins with the usual chants and wails you would expect from a Drag City album which features the band members sitting around a campfire on the back cover, but within a minute we are launched into Led Zeppelin/Cream style heavy rock. Where the hell did that come from I wonder? I certainly wasn’t expecting it but I have to say it is welcome, after the scores of alt-folk/weirdness releases this comes as a very pleasant change. Admittedly there is very little here of much originality; Pearls & Brass take the 1970s blueprint and reproduce it quite accurately, but they do it damn well so who’s complaining? Pearls & Brass show us how it’s supposed to be done and if they don’t have beards they should start growing them now, everyone knows you can’t do heavy rock without some serious facial growth.
Doom Without the Gloom, but With Tricky Rhythms
Pearls and Brass, a young band from Nazareth, Pa., suggests an old, doomy way of looking at the world: 1970's biker metal, low-pitched and greasy and repetitive. The music makes you think of Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath. But they have a lived-in sound, and an effect like high-voltage meditation. They make the simple rather complicated, and the complicated rather simple.
What makes this band so good — on its second album, "The Indian Tower" (Drag City), and in its show at Cakeshop on Saturday night — is that its musicians have thought a lot about song structure, but even more about groove. The concentration on that groove by its three members — Randy Huth on guitar, Joel Winter on bass and Josh Martin on drums — means that the band can get rhythmically tricky in its theme riffs, swinging asymmetrically between two- and three-beat patterns, but you don't much notice it. The vocal lines sail right through these rhythmic shifts, the music's heavy bottom end never alters, and it all feels like one unfolding pattern.
In keeping with so much of the rest of rock, and in distinction to their forebears, Pearls and Brass have all but ditched the solo as an expressive medium. The middle of their songs isn't really a space for soloing: it's a place to take a light nap. Where other bands would have built their crescendos, these players dived down and grew subtle, with Mr. Huth playing quiet raga-like lines, not particularly meant to draw in your attention, over a repeated bass note. They saved up their energy for the thrilling part of the song, the heart of the artichoke, when they snapped out of the reverie and hurled themselves into the verse again.
Many songs sounded roughly the same. (At Cakeshop, the band didn't roll out "I Learn the Hard Way" or "Away the Mirrors," its acoustic, country-blues like numbers on "The Indian Tower.") And Mr. Huth and Mr. Winter, the two singers, have remarkably similar voices. Still, this is cheap, effective hypnosis; it's also music that feels extremely good.