Their last show at Empty Bottle was last year and I think it was a Free Monday, it was in support of the CD We Kill Computers. Their bluesy working class sounding aggression just felt like the right kind of engagement, reaction to these rough times. I looked them up yes, but I did not intend to see them the morning of. I find that fascinating. Not knowing what will be the soundtrack to your life, and then from around the corner there it is. The soundtrack is what contains without explicitly saying it, the memories of those moments. The music reflects back to you what happened, when. The Pack A.D. have their blues down. I'm not a blues person and it's even apparent to me. I like their use of it in all their songs. It never tires because of how fluid it's in their hands. It does not sound conventional to me. And that's a danger with a band that has strong identifiable roots that you can see spanning across all they produce, repetition. In their hands the blues are an outsider's tool they use to reinterpret rock, and dare I say blues as well. And they do it all over again with the new CD Unpersons. Still bluesy but never repetitive. I can listen to it forwards and backwards. Indeed some of the songs remind me of PJ Harvey and Queen Adreena's DJin. This is not me name dropping bands. And I'm not saying that PJ is a Delta Blues woman. She don't have to be. She does well enough being PJ. Where was I? Oh yeah blues....It's still an identifiable streak in her early work, right? Wait, where was I before that? Oh, The Pack, right. It would not occur to me to put those three artists together before, even as I love them all.
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