The Prids - Do I Look Like I’m In Love?

In London hätte ich die Möglichkeit The Prids live zu sehen. Da ich jedoch am nächsten Tag zu The Cure in den Hyde Park gehen werde (außerdem spielen dort Interpol, Editors, Goldfrapp, Ride, Slowdive u.a.) und an folgenden Abenden noch Jonah Matranga und Darren Hayman (spielt Hefners „Breaking God’s Heart“) sehen werde, fällt der Konzertabend mit der Band aus Portland, Oregon, wohl aus.

Auf „Do I Look Like I’m In Love?“, dem vierten Album von David Frederickson (Gitarre, Gesang), Mistina La Fave (Bass, Gesang) und den beiden Neuzugängen Gordon Nickel (Schlagzeug) und Tim Yates (Keyboards, Bass), möchte ich dennoch ausdrücklich hinweisen. Die Einflüsse von The Prids, die in unterschiedlichen Konstellationen seit über 20 Jahren gemeinsam musizieren, liegen irgendwo zwischen Shoegaze (The Jesus And Mary Chain, Slowdive) und Noise Rock (Sonic Youth) und Gitarrenpop (The Smiths, R.E.M.). Ein tolles Album, das The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart sicherlich auch gern veröffentlicht hätten. 

Vielleicht sollte ich doch zum Konzert gehen…

With guitar tones ripped from the C86 compilation and shamelessly lovelorn lyrics, it's no wonder the Prids have been likened to 1980s gloom-pop titans the Cure and the Smiths. Lead single "Elizabeth Ann" is a perfect pop gem four decades tardy, evoking an '85 Marty McFly fantasy and a blissfully garish dance on the illuminated floor of some smoky nightclub. Most songs follow its hook-filled example, and even the slow lulls of ambient numbers are spread out in well-timed repose. Overall, it's a brazen, throwback masterpiece so vibrant and catchy that you don't even need to factor in the band's association to Doug Martsch to absolutely love them.
(Willamette Week)

The record opens with “Summer Cult”, a perfect introduction to this post-punk and shoegaze driven album. The song paves the way for the rest of the album. It begins with a heavy guitar riff and is followed by soft, steady drums which later picks up pace with La Fave’s charming vocals. This starting song to the album is one of my favorites because it is one which you could play anytime and immediately begin to sing along with. With the addition of the glockenspiel and keyboard, the song “I Remember Everything” is another which is memorable as it has a more playful sound.
Songs such as “Haunted” and “Colliding” consist of catchy guitar riffs which leave listeners wanting to replay the songs over and over again.
(KTSW 89.9)

Much more so than most of their peers, The Prids have a way with building straight-forward, hushed tracks with nodding basslines towards grandiose flourishes at the end, replete with cinematic washes of keys and truckloads of feedback. That classic mode’s certainly on display through much of Do I Look Like I’m In Love?, as on “Lie Here”. That a song about indolence, institutionalization, and denial builds to such a riotous climax is exactly the sort of paradox The Prids’ music – built on the grammar of bedroom sulking but ready to explode into the heavens – rests upon. The interstitial noises, hums, and production tics which crop up through the record have their own vitality, too, and shade it with an earthy but immediate sense of possibility.
(I Die You Die)