Photo by Peter Hutchins
When Pissed Jeans took the stage at Black Cat on Friday night, singer Matt Korvette sported a wrinkled linen shirt and a fresh mohawk. One of my friends looked at the ensemble, declared that he’d clearly just given himself the haircut that day and said, “That guy is an insurance adjuster.” (Actually, he was dead on.)
In fact, the first thing that Korvette quipped before the show started was, “Everybody’s getting home by midnight,” which fits with the band’s responsible-adult prototype but is an odd declaration for a set starting at 11:05 p.m. Surely there was no way he was serious.
As the show progressed, the singer of the Pennsylvania noise group dropped the resemblance to his day-job self and I started to play a game called “Guess Matt Korvette’s Spirit Animal.” Stick with me. The way he moved his head back and forth during “Half Idiot” before striking poses and screaming into the void, at first I thought Snapping Turtle. (There’s a lyric from that song though, that says, “I feel like a giraffe.”) Of course, the way he barked, growled and exhaled his final notes, I started to think jackal. By the middle of the set, I couldn’t help but wonder, was this what it was like like to see John Stabb front Government Issue in the 1980s?
Regardless of who or what Korvette was channeling, he was having a great time. He commented that the entire crowd had remained compliant to the Black Cat’s signs that urged against crowdsurfing and stage diving before saying, “We found a loophole—stage surfing and crowd diving.” While nobody participated in any of the above airborne acrobatics, the suggestive snaking of Korvette and the band’s heavy riffing (primarily from Honeys and King of Jeans inspired a lot of beer tossing and moshing.
It also inspired something quite a bit weirder. Korvette never returned to the stage for the encore, so drummer Sean McGuiness pulled a crowd member onstage, pantsed him and let him sing what was essentially a crowd-sourced jam session. Slowly the other members of the band began to leave the stage as well. Bassist Randy Huth watched apprehensively as his replacement bassist jumped with the bass into the swirling crowd and guitarist Bradley Fry also gave up his guitar.
After several minutes of the weirdest improv’d song ever (which was surprisingly good), McGuiness, the last remaining member onstage, ran up from his kit, grabbed the recruited band member around the waist and both went hurtling into the crowd. It all seemed very surreal but, then again, who’s to say that a 9-5 job at a desk doesn’t inspire the need for such extraordinary performance art?
