This Is Book's Music

15 years ago, when a band actually were clueless to call themselves alternative, to me it seemed like they really had no idea what they were talking about. Years after the post-modern music movement entered the mainstream, people are actually looking back at it as a glimpse of the goodness that can come from thinking independently to make music with heart and guts. Pariah Piranha look at the alternative tag with fondness, not as a pigeonhole but as a way to remember a time when being different in music meant something positive, and not something you’d find plastered on a wall in billboard form. People People (Queer Control), the band’s third album, shows that with a bit of passion and an aggressiveness to be heard, you can make people realize that being different is something you can wear on your sleeve with pride.

One can mention a number of different bands that they would sound well with: The Pixies, Luscious Jackson, Sonic Youth, and Husker Du, since Pariah Piranha are really a power pop band in the vein of The Wipers and The Fastbacks, which punk it up beautifully with a pinch of pop accessibility, still leaving them out of the Lindsay Lohan marketplace but showing that you can be loud and pretty at the same time. I don’t mean pretty in a degrading sense, and I say this this because two ladies (vocalist/guitarist Tara Gordon and drummer/singer Andrea Shearer) are in the band, but I speak of the music. Anytime there is a big of abrasive sounds with pop touches, one often refers to things being pretty and delicate, but this yin yang combination works to their advantage because they have great songs to work from, songs you want to remember and sing-a-long to at any moment. What also works is bassist Tony Garber, because sometimes I’ll hear bassists tooling around in songs and it sounds like they had just bought an instructional booklet and went into the studio. There’s nothing wrong with that, but to me the bassist is an essential part of any band, and Garber’s work stand out as being exceptional, and complimentary to Gordon’s carefully played riffs.

It rocks in all the right ways, and rather than make an attempt to fit in, they simply play music and hope people will find a way to fit them into your schedule. Make them a part of your daily routine and scream their music all day long.

“Artifacts” (free MP3 download, 10.6mb)
“Cataclysm” (free MP3 download, 10.1mb)