Pocketknife

Pocketknife

Spencer and Sarah and I went to Spike Hill the other night to see our pals A Brief Smile and they were great. This is absolutely no surprise to us. A Brief Smile is always awesome. Especially that one time up at ADP Coffee Haus at Columbia when DL (lead singer) had food poisoning and vomitted right at the beginning of the last song. Man, we liked that. But no, we write this screed to inform you of the other band we saw at Spike Hill on that fateful eve.

Yes, we loved another that night. After A Brief Smile finished, we sat at the bar at the back of the room and got drunk, like the good label executives that we are. We here at the jaded Cooling Pie "offices" are typically used to hating a lot of the random bands we see at bars. We fully expected every other band that night to suck. And yet as I ordered another Stella, something was different. The band playing sounded like....Can? We moved closer. The band was a three-piece, which is a rare occurence in the era of either duos with laptops or small armies of every instrument imaginable. The dressed as if they were the Beatles in 1964 and they were fantastic. We moved up to the front as the krautrock tune ended. Negative space. Deep groove without a trace of "funk". We were reminded of perhaps "A Ghost Is Born" era Wilco but with less of an eye on pleasing the NPR set. They traded their acoustic instruments for keyboards and then traded back again. They played a cover of "Imagine". It was less ironic than anybody would care to believe. We were sold.

These guys are called Pocketknife. We're currently trying to get them involved in our super-secret compilation project that we're working on. Hopefully there will be an announcement about that soon, but in the mean time, check out the above myspace link or Pocketknife's Last.fm page for more tunes. Hopefully, these guys will be popping up on this site real soon.