Keep the Spirit Alive: So Pitted on debut LP, Neo

If there’s one thing Nathan Rodriguez likes, it’s the word ‘conversation’. It crops up time and again over the course of our telephone chat, betraying his fondness for dialogue and participation – which isn’t what you’d expect after listening to his band So Pitted. Their debut album Neo communicates entirely through volume, texture and rhythm; a searing blast that rolls up its lyrical proclamations in a carpet of fuzz (so thick you can practically feel it), then throws the whole mess off a bridge. It’s hardcore punk slowed down to a mechanistic crunch, and rather than anything so convivial as a conversation, it feels like being furiously and incomprehensibly shouted at through thick, isolating fog.

Still, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In all likelihood, this will be the first you’ve heard of So Pitted, so you’ll be wanting to know crucial things like ‘are they any good?’ and ‘what do they sound like?’ In response to the former: yes. Very. As for the second question, we’ll defer to Rodriguez, the band’s founder member: “When people ask me how we sound,” he says, “I tell them we kinda sound like Nirvana – just to be simple.”

That’s a fair assessment: there’s more than a little overlap with their Seattle home and its musical legacy (albeit with a heavy dose of Devo, PiL and similarly-minded experimentalists), and indeed Neo is set for release through Sub Pop, the city’s foremost grunge outlet during the genre’s late 80s/early 90s heyday. “I just wanna give them the gist real quick,” he continues. “I definitely think we’re more than grunge but I think grunge is a part of us.”

“I just wanna give them the gist real quick” – Nathan Rodriguez

We'll settle for somewhere between noise-rock and post-punk, but whichever genre traces you detect in their thoroughly enjoyable racket, there’s certainly more to their sound than Kurt Cobain worship. For one thing, there’s the name – fertile ground for discussion thanks to its origins in a viral YouTube clip, where an enthusiastic young surfer bro explains the thrill of some particularly gnarly waves. “You get the best barrels ever, dude,” he tells a baffled reporter. “You just drop in, ride the barrel and get pitted, so pitted.”

Unsurprisingly as residents of America’s Pacific Northwest, the band aren’t surfers themselves (“It’s not ideal for the community over here,” Rodriguez explains drily). But for all its douchey, so-lame-it’s-cool appeal, the term ‘so pitted’ works as an explanation of Neo’s viscerally joyous listening experience: it buffets and batters you even as it pushes you along.

“Yeah, I think that kind of happened over time,” agrees Rodriguez. “On accident. I definitely would’ve liked it to be like that – I would’ve liked it to be more intentional – but when we first started we had no idea what we were doing. It took a good amount of time for us to grasp what we wanted to make.”

Fleshed out by the metronomic muscle of drummer/vocalist Liam Downey and guitarist Jeannine Koewler, So Pitted in its current iteration remains a relatively new prospect. Having worked through a succession of earlier line-ups before settling on the one responsible for Neo, Rodriguez explains how they all came together:

“I met Liam ‘cause I was a fan of his band, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head – they were kind of a big deal, at least in Seattle; they were signed to Warner Records. I was going to a lot of his shows – I was such a fan of his – and over time we started hanging out with mutual friends. One day he just showed up at this So Pitted practice, and our other drummer couldn’t make it. So we were like, ‘Ok, you wanna hang out? Wanna play drums?’ And he played, and he’s so good. It just worked out.

“A couple of years after that I met Jeannine when we worked together at this clothing shop, and she was just so cool. She learned how to play guitar for our band… and she learned so fast!”

The sound quickly coalesced around the nascent trio, and things quickly progressed. “I think it started happening around the time Jeannine joined the band. We joked about being on Sub Pop when we first started, but it was funnier then ‘cause we sucked so much. But it does kind of make sense for us to be signed to a label like that – I remember as soon as they showed interest in us, I was honoured, but there’s times when I was like, ‘Well, who else?’ It’s pretty cool to be part of a bigger conversation.”

Talk turns to post-punk – Downey, it turns out, is a huge Devo fan, perhaps informing his factory machine rhythms that add to the band’s sheared metallic clunk – and in particular its exploration of the relationship between man and machine, both in terms of subject matter and use of equipment. Given this influence, we suggest that it’s somehow appropriate that So Pitted should take their name from a snapshot of human experience, brought into the wider consciousness thanks to the advancements of shared technology.

“Yeah, I definitely noticed that. I feel good about it too. Initially it seems really tacky, but YouTube is a part of our culture. It’s pretty absurd, and it’s amazing at the same time. It’s odd ‘cause that privilege is amazing, just being able to have access to any sort of entertainment, but it’s kind of funny what we end up choosing to do with that.

“Lately I’ve been watching… you know that game The Sims? There’s compilation videos of the Sims catching on fire. It’s really funny to think about the people who are making these videos; the people who are spending hours of their time: they’re staging this video, they’re filming it, they upload it, they even put words with it. I wanna know who those people are!”

This frivolous nature doesn’t seem apparent when scrolling through the album’s song titles: Woe, The Sickness, Holding The Void, Rot In Hell… It’s not cheery stuff. Rodriguez laughs.

“It’s just a lot of concerns that we write about. And it’s kind of abstract at that point, it could be something as simple as a person we know, or an attitude that a group of people has… for example, Rot In Hell: that was my feelings towards co-workers that were so money-hungry. Looking back, it’s almost like stuff I’m saying to myself… like a very internal kind of thing, a very internal conversation.”

In short, they’re the same concerns that register with every young punk band: life and how to live it in the face of daily frustrations. But it’s the sheer, unrepentant noise concocted by So Pitted that’s the chief reason you’ll become enraptured; a nail bomb of pent-up rage that feels palpably capable of horrifying, mutilating destruction. It’s early in the year to make this sort of claim, but we can say with confidence that in ten months’ time you’ll be looking back on Neo as one of 2016’s best debuts, by some distance. The most frightening thing about it? They think they’re capable of better.

“It’s about progress, not perfection,” Rodriguez concludes. “A lot of people get lost in these tangents of what’s wrong in the world, based on what’s not perfect. And that’s true, there’s a lot that’s not perfect and I’m not trying to shut down any conversation, but you can lose a lot of your life avoiding what isn’t perfect. You could just make progress instead, in any way or form.

“Like, I look at these songs that we’ve made. They’re not perfect songs by any means. There’s moments where I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s really cool’, and there’s things I would change, parts I would sing differently, parts I would take out. But it wouldn’t be what it is if I went back and changed it. I’ll create what I wanna create next time.”

Pray they never figure out what they’re doing. Until then, let’s just see where the conversation takes them next.