Fucking in the Streets

Some band names are harder to look up on the old Google than others,
and one such difficult name is that of local band Pregnant. Not
helping matters is that the only band member whose name I know is
drummer (and new dad) Matt Doctor. Weirdly, feeding “Pregnant” and
“Doctor” into a search engine does not return a lot of hits about
fledgling post-hardcore rock bands. (And then, of course, I noticed the
address written on their demo: www.myspace.com/pregnantwa.)

The impetus for all this needless querying was last Saturday’s
HEALTH show at the Vera Project. Pregnant opened, and they were
a pleasant surprise and a high point of the whole show. The band
performed as a four-piece, although Doctor tells me that the band’s
membership is in a state of flux: Bassist Candace Harter is moving to
Portland soon, guitarists/vocalists Jared Sletager and Nick Merz
occasionally play as a duo sans drums, and other members may come and
go. (Doctor adds that after he finishes recording the band’s debut,
their core duo may experiment with playing along to recorded drums for
some future touring shows.)

For Saturday night, though, they made great use of their four-person
lineup, Doctor’s drums driving the band as the others layered three
guitars’ worth of ringing, rising discord. One song began with a
circular guitar melody piercing through a scraped-cello-string bass
sound summoned from a small keyboard; the two guitars gradually slipped
out of synch and into dissonance before the song burst into a
drum-pounding crescendo. Another ended with just a lopsided one…
twothree drum beat sounding out on its own into the feedback
swelling for the next song. The two vocalists were practically
inaudible, though, respectively mumbling or screaming red-faced but
always almost totally drowned out by the band’s admirably loud drums
and high-voltage guitar sound (courtesy of some Verellen amplifiers).
Throughout the set, the songs charged ahead, galloping rhythm and
chugging guitars, then halted for some disruptive drum break,
then swerved into unexpectedly bright melodic passages, all punctuated
by spikes of feedback and distortion.

Their two available demo tracks, “Hoax” and “Teenage Lips,” don’t do
justice to Pregnant’s live set—and in fact, the songs kind of
suffer for the vocals not being quite so awash in the music. But if
last weekend’s show was any indication, this is a quartet—or a
duo or maybe something else entirely—to keep an eye on.

Past Lives played about the same set as they did at
Bumbershoot, bookending things with a dreamy, Deerhunter-ish
noise-pop opener and a final song featuring some backward-slipping
organ sounds, a long and steadily propulsive rhythmic build, and a
tumbling, dark, and hushed chorus. Pictureplane‘s Denver-bred
junk-rave was just wack and way out of date; singing about Atlantis
over your iPod is sooo 2007. HEALTH sounded great—especially
their new stuff, with its micro delay-as-distortion—but looked
woefully underworked onstage (so much flailing about, so little guitar
playing).