The thing that I enjoy most about reviewing independent artists
is that the ones that stick in your ears have so damn much
enthusiasm for their music. A big-dollar professional producer can
— and has — made talentless singers sound like (be?)
Grammy-winners. All that’s missing is… Heart. Passion.
Sincerity.
When you’re working closer to the ground, those intangibles are
what it’s all about, and Raleigh, North Carolina’s Pico vs. Island
Trees — yep, they named their band after a court case, silly
college boys — give these songs everything they’ve got and then
some.
Pico’s sound is college-coffeehouse jammy-sloppy jazz-pop-folk.
The guitars (by Chris Karlsson and Jeremy Bullock) are mostly
either acoustic or soft, restrained electric, and the vocals and
drums (Bryan Carter, doubling as drummer and lead singer/lyricist)
are miked for that loose, live-in-the-living-room sound. The one
time the band gets heavier is when former Ben Folds Fiver Robert
Sledge stops in to lend his fat fuzz-toned bass to the Dave
Matthews-ish “Six Up.”
The group’s lyrics often delve into college-romance
love-lessons-learned land, but steer clear of clichés.
Instead, Carter hits you with flashes of stream-of-consciousness
brilliance like: “It’s the stupid promises we make / That lead us
to our great mistakes / And we can’t take them back / No you won’t
take me back / I want you back.” As earnest as some of these cuts
are, they’re consistently artful as well, suggesting Carter may
just get better and better.
Getting to specifics, there’s a sensitive-boy sweetness to the
above-quoted “Autumn,” a beautifully paced breakup song that
gradually builds up to a powerful release and finish. I also loved
the strings on “Lost,” the insightful poetry of “Broken,” and the
genuine sense of loss conveyed in the appropriately ragged lament
“Consolation.”
Not that everything on
Just Wait is all serious-like, though; the Picos also cut
loose with a goofy wit on tracks like “Mother of Pearl,” which
offers a trance-y two-and-a-half minute chant followed by an
afterthought verse that punchlines with this nugget: “Necessity is
the mother of invention / But she done gave that baby away.”
LOL…
nice. “Brand New Set Of Wings” is another cut with enough
sweetness and silliness to charm the pants off any number of
Basement-tapes touches like the endearingly sloppy handclaps on
“Saying The Opposite” only reinforce the sense that this is a
young, enthusiastic band that just wants to play. No popstar
wannabes here; just musicians who believe in their art. And now I
do, too.
