Punk is officially over the hill at this point, having passed its 40th birthday: Blow out the candles and buy it some gag gifts. As the oldest musicians reckon with maturity in a genre that was developed for and by their young and reactionary selves, and successive generations of musicians discover the grit and power of an increasing number of subgenre styles, the dialogue about what's punk and what isn't gets increasingly tangled. At the core of every single one of those subgenres, though, and therefore residing somewhere at the core of punk itself, is minimalist force—sometimes pure id, sometimes reflexive egoic commentary thereon, sometimes both at once. Minimalist force is what Seattle's So Pitted does. They excel at it.
On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it. Guitarist Jeannine Koewler's melodic lines, lower on the scale and blown out through a bass amp, bulk out their nasty sound. Drummer Liam Downey, who also shares some of the vocal duties, is what a punk drummer needs to be: both a hard hitter and nimbly able to keep quick time when necessary. Vocalist and guitarist Nathan Rodriguez snarls his way through his scratchy, dissonant, percussive instrumental work just as much as he does in his robotic, distorted singing.
There's certainly a lot of Touch & Go and AmRep (and early Sub Pop, too, which makes their choice of label perfectly logical) back catalog mining to what So Pitted does, as there is for any contemporary noise rock band. But songs like "i'm not over it," which is half sludgy instrumental and half incitement to circle pit; "the sickness," which slides from noise-rock gnarl to post-punk precariousness in a way that seems wholly natural; and "holding the void," in which layers of noise and screel are added and peeled away to reckless effect, pay their homages without walking in the footsteps of those who came before.
Best of all, So Pitted sound like they move as a unit. This is where their true energy derives—from their internal communication. You don't hear the gears grinding or see the wires—you only see the bull in all its terrifying, joyful glory and the destruction it causes.
