Recording review - Peace, In Love (2013)

Remember early '90s Brit-pop? You will.

Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Peace's Brit-pop influences may not quite reach such colossal heights, but the band certainly takes the boost and enjoys the view. The British music press has hyped the band as the Second Coming, but cynics could easily interpret them as a rehash of the past. Indeed, song by song on In Love, it's easy to pick out inspirations and appropriated parts that read like a recap of popular British bands dating back to the early 90s: Blur, The Stone Roses, The Cure, and Oasis, to name just a few. Jim Albiss, who produced The Arctic Monkey's stunning debut, also managed to infuse a fair amount of that album into this project. On paper, this makes In Love a sort of Frankenstein's Monster amalgam of scavenged parts, but, surprisingly, Peace lives up to their reputation and overcomes knee-jerk dismissal. It helps that their playing is solid and they fully commit to the material, but it's the strong pacing between the tracks that largely distracts listeners from picking the songs apart.

A particularly good example is the flow between "Lovesick" and "Float Forever". The cheery bounce of "Lovesick" essentially reworks The Cure's "Friday I'm In Love" with manic energy:

Stay awake or go to sleep
Trust me, Baby, I'm a creep
And I'm lovesick with you

It makes me so happy, my mascara runs just a little. But just as the emo pop becomes slightly cloying, the song throws in the towel and the reflective pop of "Float Forever" provides a palate cleansing antidote. The sparse arrangement at the opening creates a late night, confessional feel. It's every bit as false as "Lovesick", with vaguely philosophical lyrics, but the balance is sweet. The band's metaphors are a bit strained, but catchy enough to work:

Hold on to your headlight
They hold your skin to your bones
Fold in fear in the white lines
You know you float forever
You know we'll float forever in the tide

The song gradually builds into a rousing affirmation, before subsiding to reprise the first verse with a wistful feel. Then, rather than let the energy drag, they lay down a set of upbeat, indie funk tracks, starting with "Wraith".

The contrast between In Love and their live show is stark. I saw Peace last month with Team Spirit in Denver (review). In preparation, I listened to several of their tunes beforehand to get a sense of their sound. The gulf between the funky "Wraith" and their spacy cover of Binary Finary's "1998" (from their 2012 Delicious EP) made it hard to pigeonhole them and their setlist delivered on that eclecticism. While their performance was raucous and intense, the studio gives them the bandwidth to develop some more nuanced arrangements.

One of my favorites is "Follow Baby", which kicks off with a discordant psychedelic guitar riff and then retreats to the fringes with a halo of feedback to give Harry Koisser's diffident voice some room. Call it Brit-grunge, but subtle details hide in the shadows of the verses: wah wah chuck-a-chuck rhythms, tremolo arpeggios, and keyboard-like chimes. Later, on the Blur-flavored "Waste of Paint", Koisser and fellow guitarist Douglas Castle each take their own approach to rhythm and melody. The two guitar tracks sound completely independent, but their funk strums interlock before splitting apart into nicely contrasting fill lines.

All in all, I like In Love, but I can't quite say I love it. It succeeds as a well-crafted pop album, but after a few times through I find myself wanting a stronger personality to come through. In that way, I'm not sure they measure up to their Brit-pop idols. Hearing them channel Oasis channeling the Beatles doesn't really satisfy. Despite that, I'm not ready to give up on Peace. Their enthusiasm on "1998" suggests that they could still find a stronger voice of their own.

Concert review: Peace with Team Spirit and Twin Peaks

3 June 2013 (Larimer Lounge, Denver CO)
After meeting the guys from Team Spirit at South By Southwest (read the interview) and catching two of their sets, I was excited to see them again. I wasn't familiar with Peace before the show, but I listened to a couple of songs online and liked the polished post-punk sound.

My only regret for the show was that the crowd was awfully sparse. They made up for it with enthusiasm, especially a couple of guys that drove up from Texas.

Twin Peaks

The first thing to keep straight is that there are at least two bands out there called Twin Peaks. The heavy pop version hails from Chicago. This show featured Denver's indie-rocking four-piece. They were a good fit for this show. Their embrace of noisy, classic rock drive and close-formation guitar riffs warmed up our ears for Team Spirit's twin guitar attack, while the heady new wave jams occasionally drifted towards an art rock feel, foreshadowing Peace's set.

While quite good, their studio work doesn't begin to represent their live sound. On stage, the cathartic clash of guitars dominates the mix, showing some fairly heavy influences. Additionally, their drummer gets a freer range to explore some inspired syncopation. I was impressed with how fluidly they surfed between hard-hitting classic rock and trippier, layered wanderings.

Front man Addison Friesen conveys intensity and focus during the songs and a looser self-deprecation between songs. Actually, the whole band came across as fairly earnest without any affected naïveté.As the final song built to a peak, the whole band radiated a simple happiness. The band's stage presence was relatively static until the big ending; then, Friesen flopped onto his back in front of the drum kit, still wringing waves of noise from his guitar.

Team Spirit

Team Spirit's EP and associated videos offer a good sense of the band's irreverent attitude and musical mindset, but can't quite encompass the wild exuberance of their live show. In constant motion, front man Ayad Al Adhamy would fall back from the mike, then hunch forward over his guitar. All of his movements were played large, as if he was on a grander stage. Every time I've seen the band, Al Adhamy has found one big gesture to serve as a climax, like crowd-surfing as while singing. At this show, he kicked some beers out of the way and came out into the audience as one lucky fan played human mic-stand.

The other three guys may have shown a little more restraint, but they were hardly wallflowers. Bass player Toby Pettigrew held to a Zen calm when he was just playing, but he confronted the mic during his backing vocals. Tightly coiled, he pounded out a staccato punch of notes. Guitarist Cosmo DiGuilio's casual confidence reminded me of Johnny Ramone as he swapped between ringing guitar riffs and a rapid-fire downstroke rhythm.

Team Spirit's songs are best described as pop-infused garage rock, played with an emphasis on classic rock era twinned guitars. Playing live, they amped up the songs with punk bravado and barely constrained thrash. They kept the crowd on edge as they whipsawed from rhythm shred to perfectly aligned guitar passages. Mike Addesso's drumming pushed the extremes, supporting the changes with his own shifts between flashy cymbal/tom work and syncopated phrasing that echoed the guitars.

Team Spirit continues to be one of my favorite bands to see live. I'm looking forward to watching the band grow into their potential, with longer set lists and bigger crowds to inspire them. The band is already working on extending their set list. They pulled out a couple of new tunes and talked about their recent recording sessions.

Peace

Birmingham band Peace has already garnered a ridiculous level of hype from the British press, with The Guardian suggesting that they're the future of Indie and gushing write-ups from NME. Trend-spotting press here, like Filter, have also climbed on board. The band's debut release, In Love, satisfied expectation without triggering a backlash, so they're on track to tackle the rest of the world with a club-level tour of the U.S.

As I mentioned, I had listened to a couple tracks before the show. "Wraith" reminded me a bit of the Arctic Monkeys' danceable indie rock with a funkier guitar riff. "1998", their cover of Binary Finary's trance classic, reinvented the robotic beat as a Pink Floyd space jam. The divide between these two songs suggested a diverse set. Peace delivered on that promise, with bandleader Harry Koisser giving many of the songs a psychedelic edge, his stereo guitar mix mutated with heady echoes and other effects. In contrast, the band's rhythm section anchored most the songs with a steady, driving beat.

Peace had a chameleon-like sound, appropriating bits of U2, the Cure, as well as The Stone Roses and a host of other retro Britpop bands. The set list meshed well, but kept the audience engaged with a shifting palette of styles. Their live version of "1998" emphasized the Pink Floyd "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" bassline and the processed sound of Koisser's guitar took on a keyboard role. Drummer Dominic Boyce was phenomenal, taking the beat into jazz experimentation with prog-style bombast. Rattling echoes, guitar ululation, and the enveloping throb of bass made this a peak moment in the show. The rumbling bass set up the transition to the next track, "Toxic", which had an early Radiohead sound.

After the thrashing playfulness of Team Spirit, Peace's stage presence did seem a bit mild mannered, but both bands found noisy islands of catharsis that made the Larimer Lounge feel like a full concert hall.

More photos on my Flickr.