So Michael Pitt, the actor, was in a musical in 2001, Hedwig and the Angry Inch; contributed a song to the soundtrack of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers as well as acted the film's lead; and played a Kurt Cobain stand-in in Last Days, Gus Van Zant's 2005 death flick. He is a pretty boy. His band, Pagoda, in which he plays guitar and sings, had their record released in February by Thurston Moore, who first met Pitt when they both worked on Larry Clark's Bully. Ryan Donowho, an "O.C." bit player and aspiring actor-- also plucked from the street, at which time he was playing drums as a street-musician-- played drums on the record before leaving the band for a nascent acting career.
But it's not the youthful musical theater indiscretions, or the hipster bio, or the famous friends, or even the perception that he's an actor slumming acting like a musician that will make Pitt's record occasional tough going, but the fact that he once played Kurt Cobain in a movie and now sings like him on his debut CD.
To my mind, there are worse crimes (say, ripping off Pearl Jam, and propagating that Eddie Vedder-howl all the way into the new century). And though some critics think that American pop-rock can have a second act only when filtered through a foreign country, accent, and wardrobe, I'd say uncomplicated ambition and admiration don't automatically make you a con man or a shill or a rip-off artist, but just a band that likes other bands and wants to become a band, too. Which is more or less how I hear Pagoda. Think, for instance, about the upcoming YACHT/Lucky Dragons Nirvana remix 12", and why no one will have a problem with it.
Lead single "Lesson Learned" does indeed sound like "Rape Me", including as referents an ascending refrain and muted power chords. Other Nirvanaisms are "Amego"'s hyper-inarticulate "Damn la la la la My Friend la la la la" segue into "blah blah blah blah," the one-to-two-word 1990s song titling, and "Fetus", which seems like it must be a Nevermind joke, right down to the junk cameo. It's also clearly a song about Michael Pitt's girlfriend/wife/lover getting an abortion. One interpretation here is that Pagoda are satirical geniuses-- "Amego" also interpolates snips of samples of serious sounding things such as weapon of mass destruction and war on terrorism while rhyming "amego" with "loco" and "Mexico."
Other critical hotspots include "Voices", which has more than a little "Bad to the Bone" to it, Pitt doing a deadpan reading from what appears to be his journal in the final 10-minute opus "I Do", and the female orgasm noises that appear earlier in that song. Plus the junk, dope, and dope-sick talk, which is either totally appropriate or totally inappropriate for a record this heavily influenced by Nirvana.
If all this makes you want to throw on some Nirvana and not some Pagoda, go ahead, but listening to this record, it occurs: what was the last band that really did sound like Nirvana? Their aspirations are so familiar as to be laughable until you realize why they're familiar. Pitt, a year older than me, has my generational preoccupations, unreconstructed. If he's moved on less than the rest of us, who could hate him for forming the band we once all wanted to be in?
