Music journalist Rob Sheffield famously described New Zealand pop band the Clean (famously among Flying Nun enthusiasts, anyhow) as what the Velvets would sound like if they "had ever been deported to an island of 6 million sheep." Pete and the Pirates, then, are the Clean if Kilgour & co. forsook their homeland's livestock-freckled landscape for a thickly populated post-industrial UK burgh. "Ill Love", lead-off track on the Reading band's inaugural LP Little Death could, with its babbling bass, rattling guitar, and infectious-as-ringworm melody be Dunedin, 1981, all over again.
Any Kiwi bloodlines, however, are diverted through the now-hegemonic channels of 1990s American indie rock. So as much as the album sounds like a lost tape from the Boodle Boodle Boodle sessions, that's probably only because it rings with scrappy, melodic Pavementisms, amber-toned Yo La Tengo chords, and the genial chug of Superchunk's brake-free singles. "Come on Feet", one of the year's most potent earworms dangles a couple shallow hooks before plowing into a tent revival of maniacal handclapping and late-night, lager-sotted ooh-oohs. Singer/guitarist Tom Sanders previously recorded "Feet" (as well as "She Doesn't Belong to Me", née "She Doesn't Belong") for his Tap Tap solo project, but the full-band version of the song, which now also includes vocals from second guitarist Pete Hefferan (one of two Petes in the Pirates) exercises the song's full anthemic potential. "Knots" is a two-and-change blast of chipped guitar and oscillating rhythm. Even tracks that start woozy like "Eyes Like Tar" are pebbles on an incline; once kicked they can't seem to defy the laws of physics.
Producer Gareth Parton (the Go! Team, Foals) wisely handles Little Death with a light touch, engineering some fantastic vocal interplay (like less dramaturgical versions of the Futureheads), and otherwise leaving things the hell alone. The Pirates aren't up to anything fancy lyrically, either. They ply several clever turns of phrase, even passages of rueful wit ("You and me trying hard to remember/ How we ever started out with our sights so high"), but most songs couch romantic travail and workaday worry in familiar pop music terms. There are endless references to bed-- knocking boots, passing out, and just plain sleeping. But unlike that of their laddish contemporaries, the Pirates' version of debauchery is mostly milquetoast, the Saturday night escapades of guys who don collared shirts and brave the M4 each weekday to get to their entry-level insurance jobs. In other words, a welcome respite for anyone weary of the tabloid exploits of that other Pete, Doherty (which is everyone, right?).
Even if you'd be loathe to admit it to your friends, "Dry Wings", with lines like, "Time for bed/ Find a girl and go to bed/ Close your eyes/ Stars are falling from the sky," is mighty affecting-- a winking galaxy of jangled wist, sweet, staggered harmonies and a gawky, yearning sense of wonder. And beneath the crusty shell of apathy and cynicism and the buzz and fuzz and hiss isn't that, fundamentally, what the best indie rock is always trying to communicate?
