Meeting of Important People’s 2009 self-titled debut release was a sketchbook of small details and stolen moments, stitched together as lyrically impressionistic vignettes and set against too many perfectly cultivated harmonies to count. The high points (“Mother’s Pay More” and “I Know Every Street”) offered glimpses of  a dreamworld populated by desperate youth and blood thirsty babes, detailing the lost nights and lost loves that never existed.

While that wistful album resembled something like  a book of  poetry, the group’s current effort, the seven song Quit Music EP available for download here, comes closer to a collection of short stories with each song possessing slivers of plot, drama and the fragile soul of small town life.  Lead singer/songwriter Josh Verbanets provides his characters with rousing backgrounds of British Invasion pop, bristling with moments of AM radio melody and world beating power chords.  Slowly, I could not shake the comparison to The Kinks and their small town/countryside opus The Village Green Preservation Society. Tracks after the jump.

Pieces of the story and town are small, but poignant: a father reconciling his skepticism and informing his sons to show hospitality to drifters looking for lodging  (“Training Song”), a man convinced he should shed all of his possessions and embrace Jesus as the messiah (“Jesus Song”), the boastings of status and reputation in a city that seems like a distant and unobtainable dream (“They Love Me in the City”),  a man’s fantasy of a perfect wife that, he claims, can focus his rudderless existence (“Country Wife”). Even the cover selected (Every Mother’s Son – “Come on Down to My Boat”)  tells the tale of a boy determined to impress the fisherman’s daughter by bringing her down to his boat.

The characters in these stories are grasping at fleeting notions of being a better person or doing bigger things, ideas that hit pretty close to home in Pittsburgh (the most small-town-like big city of them all). They may be running in place or only close to attaining the illusion of happiness, but their desire still has mass and weight. Of course, Meeting of Important People wouldn’t be Meeting of Important People unless they underlined all that existential dilemma with jaunty compositions of vintage power pop bliss,  littering these tracks with hooks and harmonies that would put most local acts to shame and slowly turning the sad irony of these meek characters into sincere hopefulness.

Meeting of Important People went back to their roots and assessed their influences with the Quit Music EP, resulting in their most fully realized and focused work to date.  It will be exciting to see the guys try these songs out in a live setting and with two upcoming EP release shows (7/24 21+ @ Thunderbird Cafe, 7/30 all ages @ The Warhol) we will all have chance soon enough.

Meeting of Important People – Jesus Song

Meeting of Important People – Country Wife

Someone should hit me. I have put off reviewing Meeting of Important People’s debut album, which came out late last March, for nearly five months now. However, after seeing them close to seven times over the past year, I can certainly attest to their quality.  One of the first Pittsburgh bands who truly pushed me into discovering local music, MOIP are most definitely a power pop force to be reckoned with.  Between cuts like “I Know Every Street” and “Mothers Pay More” their debut was a steadily assured work of craftsmanship, lovingly created with a keen ear for hook and melody that lead singer/guitarist Josh Verbantes has been known for (popsmith? is that a profession?).  Now, with their first proper video for “Brittney Lane” (which is all over WYEP at the moment) and rumblings of a recent signing to an indie imprint, MOIP seem poised to venture further outside the confluence than ever before.  Thanks to HughShows for the heads up.

Hopefully, the track selections will possess enough variety to provide a brief snapshot of the broad and expanding  Pittsburgh independent music community.  Most, if not all, of the groups featured here will be playing shows in Pittsburgh over the summer months, check back soon for Speed of the Pittsburgh Sound’s updated June/July concert calendar. Enough shameless plugging, on to the tunes.

Kim Phuc – Wormwood Star

Kim Phuc’s “Wormwood Star” has the feeling of an early Stooges outtake, a track that would have been deemed too loud, too vicious, and simply too scary for audiences circa 1969 to process let alone enjoy. With its dangerous, buzz saw guitars, face pounding drum sections and apocalyptically cryptic vocals, “Wormwood Star” possesses the kind of doomed menace serious metal bands unwittingly force into parody. This is the soundtrack to a riot, a buckshot blast through a store front, white hot and unstable.

Fresh off a string of South By Southwest shows that saw the band rubbing elbows and playing on the same bill as LA scene builders No Age and Mika Miko, Kim Phuc brings their snarling, no frills proto-punk to Mr. Roboto Project on May 25. Enter at your own risk.

Meeting of Important People – I Know Every Street

I don’t mean to speculate about Josh Verbanets’s, Meeting of Important People’s lead singer-songwriter/guitarist, motives behind writing a song like “I Know Every Street,” a track he contributed to his former band’s LP (Lohio’s History, The Destroyer) and is now featured as the centerpiece of Meeting of Important People’s debut, self-titled album.  I’d like to think he’s talking about Pittsburgh and the ways in which this town’s intricacies feel small enough to learn but damn near impossible to master.  The track is a quieter, down tempo jam (and staple of MOIP’s live show) that slowly builds to a rocking crescendo, with Verbanets declaring he “leads every beat in this town.” Could this song be a call to arms for the rest of Pittsburgh’s indie pop elite to conquer the city? For bands like Donora, Good Night, States, Lohio  and now Meeting of Important People, I think they already have.

David Bernabo + Assembly – Out There (Birdshit Remix)

David Bernabo, Pittsburgh’s mad scientist of folk-blues-hip-hop-rock fusion, and his group Assembly crafted the beautiful mess “Out There,” remixed by Birdshit of local prog metal group Drugdealer, for their Mahler Box EP released last fall. Disjointed, melodic and danceable  in the same breath, “Out There” showcases Bernabo’s knack for creating innovative vocal harmonies and challenging compositions, highlighted by the spastically active, yet deceptively simple production by Birdshit.  It’s a major concoction from Pittsburgh’s most astute connoisseurs of avant-pop, a track that’s lovely and adoringly garish in equal amounts.  Listening to the Mahler Box EP on repeat has brought my excitement to a fever pitch for the group’s first full length album, Happener Magicker, to be released early this summer.

Mariage Blanc – Contrary to Popular Belief

Mariage Blanc’s “Contrary to Popular Belief”, off the group’s first EP Broken Record released last fall, has the immediate mood of a sweeping epic, even while the track clocks in at a little less than four minutes. A novel’s worth of emotion radiates from the quiet strings, elegiac vocals and little production touches that make the song shimmer with nuance and depth.  As the jaunty, Scott Joplin-pianos get paired with sparking electric guitars for the heartbreaking coda, the denouement feels completely fitting and realized. Not many groups can intuit this much feeling over the course of an entire album let alone one song, but Mariage Blanc seem more than comfortable discarding melodrama and sappy sentiment to create songs that are genuinely moving. Mariage Blanc plays with Boca Chica and Prussia at Howler’s Coyote Cafe on May 27th.