After catching Surfer Blood a few times at SXSW this year, I was pretty sure I’d seen enough of the band. Their debut album is catchy and addictive; their live show was not. Though they showed signs of improvement in their first months of touring Astrocoast, they didn’t have any dynamism on stage, and it was visually drab.
Throw that idea in the trash can right now. On Tuesday night, the opening night of CMJ, Surfer Blood changed my mind completely – this band has figured out how to put on a stage show. Specifically, frontman John Paul Pitts has found some attitude.
Pitts was exciting to watch, as he bumped around the stage, facing off with other instrumentalists in the band, kneeling and crawling around the stage, lying on his back, jumping into the pit to sing, and even biting the sweatshirt of a hapless teen in the front row. Pitts and Surfer Blood seem to have internalized these songs enough to have fun with them, experimenting with a looser stage presence. They played a new song too, though, and the energy didn’t lag at all – a good sign of things to come.
