Pinback @ The Empire, Sacramento

By Fringe Staff

By Konrad Kruszewski

Thanks for coming…. I mean… thanks for staying,” said a sheepish Rob Crow to his audience. An audience that showed up mostly for Louis XIV, and was quite vocal about it. An audience that would soon come to realize just exactly why Pinback was the headliner that night. Though that’s a point probably further confused by the fact that the rag-tag crew setting up the instruments actually turned out to be the ones playing them for us 20 minutes later. Not a common occurrence for radio-sponsored shows these days.

The realization would be slow. The requisite awkward banter between songs fell flat to an unreceptive crowd bent on one thing. “Just play your guitars!” The fans yelled.

And so they did.

With an almost infectious innocence, Zach Smith began wailing into his bass. The expression on his face would lead one to think he was just as curious about what sound the instrument hanging from his shoulders would make as we were. The rest of his body told a different story. In a deceptively effortless execution, his hands danced on the bass strings with a technical precision for which I have no worthy point of reference.

“Syracuse!” the fans yelled in the short space between songs. “Penelope!” But requests for old favorites fell on deaf ears. While the rest of the mostly radio-friendly audience kept their chatter to a low murmur, a slowly building wave of sound began to rise up on stage. It crept up to the edge, until it burst forth and flooded the crowd with a rush of beautiful, all encompassing rhythmn and hypnotic melody. You could only stop to think and ask yourself, were you drowning, or breathing for the first time? Rob and Zach’s vulnerable vocal harmonies danced in and out of unison with the subtle guitar tones, complementing one another where they weren’t building on each other’s tempo and volume. My words go blind when attempting to relay the rendition of their emotional epic, “Walters.” What starts in an afterthought of a bittersweet farewell melody, leaving you on the side of the road to watch it walk away, builds such thundering power that you can’t help but be pulled in as it blasts off into the horizon, taking everyone and everything with it. Llike all good things, the time you have with it is brief, and only leaves you coiled on the ground, wishing for more.

This is what live music is about. This is why we stand in line in the cold with strangers.

As each song quietly crept into your ears, and proceeded to pound you senseless with an unexpected rush of melody, the voices in the audience dropped off one by one. The house went from Rogue Wave’s sugary pop ballads, to the surge of Louis XIV’s arena-grade glamrock energy, to an almost uncomfortably intimate performance with Pinback. A performance that commanded silence. While their openers were intent on wowing the audience with polished production and stage theatrics, Pinback seemed more concerned with playing their instruments on stage for us. They came off uniquely genuine and honest. Perhaps a little too honest, toward the climax of the show. True music geeks at heart, Zach and Rob raised their guitars up vertically and shouted out “STAR POWER!!” before breaking into the final stretch of their show stopper. They may be Guitar Heroes playing to a virtual audience in their own heads, but they sure as hell weren’t playing their songs on medium.