THE SPARKLY THREE
Please welcome, Pit Er Pat

On first listen, Pit Er Pat's debut album, Emergency (Overcoat), sounds like romantic bicycling music fro the 1930s. They have the word "carnavalesque" pinned to their lapels and the lyrics Fay Davis-Jeffers flutters around the music are, at times, parabolic. In "Bog Man" an idealistic youth finds himself in a thicket anxiously dancing with a marshy character. Drummer Butchy Fuego and bassist Rob Duran add to this haunting and joyous dervish, accompanied by David-Jeffers as she plays the organ while birds fly out of her mouth as she sings.

The Chicago trio met as a backing band for a fourth member, who absconded to New York City. Under the name Blackbirds, they found they understood each other, despite their diverse backgrounds. In person, Doran is the lesser spoken, while Fuego chimes in with fantastic stories and Davis-Jeffers elucidates her own. Finding the context in which their music will be placed i someone's day would be amazing, they say, but the connection to their music is too close to consider. Parts of a song get built in an amorphous way. The solution, when they begin, is pleasantly out of sight. "We're all different," Fuego states, "but we understand each other's musical vocabularies." All of the songs on Emergency were instrumentals until Davis-Jeffers adjoined words. On her writing, she says, "When approaching a new part--this is especially true of the older songs and some of the ones on Emergency--sometimes I would imagine a narrative that I could then translate into sound, not necessarily with a beginning, middle, climax, end but building a music with images, words or feelings, little glimpses of things in a world and translated into music. It's like a soundtrack to this imagination. But maybe not a soundtrack, because it doesn't go along with a story; it is the story, it is the image." This is by no means a musical formula, she reiterates, for herself or for her bandmates.

At the Empty Bottle, a music venue in Chicago, Davis-Jeffers' lyrics fold into Fuego's hard-hitting hustle. Doran's bass palpitates throughout. The rattle from a 12-year-old's keepsake box grows into a matured fervor. Earlier, Doran had said, "It sucks if the only way you can feel something from the piece is to know something about its context...Well, that doesn't help me with being human right now." Fuego agrees, "When [making music] becomes so inward looking, it loses its spark, and its excitement."

It's 11:34PM and the crowd is in a flurry of its own, hanging on to Pit Er Pat's lapels, until they've found themselves unhinged into something unspeakably and amazingly new.

Pit Er Pat recently signed to Thrill Jockey Records and will release a new record in 2005.