Live: Pepper Rabbit @ The Bootleg Theater, 1.19.10

[svgallery name=”2010-01 Pepper Rabbit”]

All photos by David Greenwald

Most bands are terrible with tape loops. What sounds great on record is often difficult to reproduce in a performance, and though a number of solo acts — St. Vincent, Andrew Bird, Owen Pallett — use it as an essential element of their repertoire, it’s rare to find a musician outside of consumate performer Jon Brion who ever makes tapping that pedal look easy. Yet Pepper Rabbit, a trio based mainly on keyboards, bass and drums, stitched in their live looping seamlessly on Tuesday night, fleshing out their gloomy psych-pop with clarinet, ukelele, harmonies and whatever was at hand in their surprisingly cluttered stage. It was precocious stuff from a wet-footed live act, but the songs were as sharp as their instrumental sureness, gaining a boldness and volume on stage that recalled Grizzly Bear’s promising early days. Head down the rabbit hole with these guys soon — before it becomes the Palladium. [Hi-res photos on Flickr] Update: You can watch pretty much the whole show on YouTube.

Pepper Rabbit – “Red Wine”: mp3

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