Laura Kerry
I expect that every time I type “Peaer” throughout this piece, I will first write “Pear” and then backtrack to add in the extra “e.” I am programmed to assume that when writing a word that sounds like “pair,” an “r” will immediately follow the “pea.”
This is the expectations game that Peaer (just went back to add the “e”) sets up even before their album begins. Peter Katz, the man behind the Brooklyn-based band offers a set of assumptions in the approach to his music, then quickly dashes them. In his new self-titled LP, he waits all of 35 seconds before the first big surprise.
“Pink Spit,” Peaer's opener, begins in acoustic piano, playing softly through the song’s main chords and melodies. All of sudden, after the listener has relaxed into complacency, Katz and his new co-conspirators, Max Kupperberg (drums) and Michael Steck (bass), enter with the forceful, fuzzy notes of a power-pop ditty worthy of early Weezer comparisons. But that’s not the last shift; “Pink Spit” continues to slide through different sounds, introducing moments of quiet, patterns of interweaving voices, and surprising rhythms next to a hook of a melody.
Paear continues to subvert expectations throughout the seven-track album, ducking in and out of what’s familiar and comfortable. At its fuzziest and most apathetically sung, the band enters the territory of 2000s slacker pop-punk. In “Pink Spit,” Katz sings, “Just let me smoke my spliff”; in “I.H.S.Y.A.,” he reveals that the greater part of the title acronym stands for the heart-sick phrase, “I hate seeing you”; and in “Sick,” a song full of pop-punk self-pity, he sings, “I’m sick of being tired of myself.” Full of distorted guitars and big drums, this strain marks a more energetic, rock-oriented turn for Peaer, whose first album, The Eyes Sink Into the Skull (2014) was quieter and more straightforwardly math-rock.
Peaer has plenty of its own math, though. As he does with the shifts in “Pink Spit,” Katz continues to play with rhythms and time signatures to combine emo with intelligent calculation in the manner of newly-reformed ‘90s band American Football. It can’t be a coincidence that the song called “Drunk” employs a destabilizing count—an extra beat to throw off the balance of the listener.
In “I.H.S.Y.A.,” the slipping and sliding of expectations goes too far, slipping just beyond reach. In the absence of graspable parts, though, the song highlights another force at work in the album, Peaer’s clever use of dynamics—the relationships between sounds, particularly the contrast between loud and soft, density and space. Still, when “Sick,” the album’s clearest and poppiest track arrives next, it is welcomed.
I’m happy to report that the when I wrote “Peaer” in that last paragraph, I got it on my first try. And despite the odd spellings and jarring surprises, Katz and his new album have won me over.