Panda and Angel
w/Wolf Parade, DJ Tribbles
Thurs July 14, the War Room, time 9 pm, $5.
Central Ohio has miles of flattened land suitable for farms and strip malls. Needless to say, the region doesn't top any "desirable places" lists, but something about that landscape must be inspiring. It produced lo-fi titans Guided by Voices, punk-metal maniacs Party of Helicopters, and three-fifths of Seattle's own Panda and Angel.
While a name like Panda and Angel might conjure images of a martial arts tag team, the Seattle lo-fiers actually took their name from a drug-addicted couple living in Mansfield, Ohio: hometown of guitarist/ songwriter Josh Wackerly (of S), bassist Laura Enderle, and drummer Zaun Zehner. Singer Carrie Murphy (Touchdown Eagle) and keyboardist Kara Kikuchi both hail from Utah. And just like a pair of junky lovers, Panda and Angel's music is fragile and emotionally charged. On their eponymous disc, they fuse those feelings to crisp guitars, electronic blips, and cascading distortion.
Murphy, easily the band's secret weapon, sounds as if she's crooning in your hallway. Her soothing, asexual vocals add emotional weight to tracks like "Christmas" with its blunt lyric, "Your cousin shot himself that year/and left the note hanging from the door." The song approaches the blue-collar-isms of Raymond Carver, with Murphy delivering the words "Before the pills/I loved you more," in her gorgeous Joni Mitchell-in-the-afterlife voice. Album highlight "Dangerous" shifts direction slightly, flirting with soft-to-loud shoe-gazer tendencies and topic of feverish heartache.
While it remains to be seen if Panda and Angel's rawness wins them fans in central Ohio, their distortion-heavy intimacy is a welcome presence on the slightly reticent Northwest scene. ■
