CREEM SHOWCASE
The blonde with the bass is the one you notice first. But thanks in large part to Joey Pesce, ’til tuesday’s swell-dressed keyboard korner, the Boston-based band have managed to break free of the bar circuit with dignity and credit ratings intact, if not improved.
CREEM SHOWCASE
THE MATURATION OF JOEY PESCE
by
Dan Hedges
The blonde with the bass is the one you notice first. But thanks in large part to Joey Pesce, ’til tuesday’s swelldressed keyboard korner, the Boston-based band have managed to break free of the bar circuit with dignity and credit ratings intact, if not improved.
Voices Carry, their debut album, fared well in the vinyl wars. But it’s their newest (the Rhett Davies-produced Welcome Home) that’s had the critics turning handstands. The band, they all seem to be saying, has “matured.” They’ve avoided the dreaded sophomore slump, turning the initially harder, abrasive attack into a more instrumentally homogeneous approach.
In other words, the new stuff sounds better.
“I didn’t change my approach to keyboards,” Pesce says of his contribution to the Cosmic Whole. “It was just captured in a different way by Rhett Davies, more in the way it was originally intended. The fullness of the keyboards didn’t translate onto Voices Carry. The keyboards and guitar got lost, so we were more sensitive this time to tonal arrangement. I had better instruments to work with too, so the new album sits in the speakers better.”