Jul 31, 2015 Music
Manchester’s Pins ride on a one-chord grind that’s as old as Bo Diddley, but has its apex in the dirty dirges of renegade 1970s duo, Suicide, and a fine revival in the tensile rage of Dunedin’s Peter Gutteridge – and especially, his 1980s group Snapper.Draping their mitochondrial rhythms with singsong melodies and lyric couplets that are so superficial that they’re either sublimely complementary or insulting, they plod away like post-industrial automatons (savants or robots?) as if they didn’t give a shit.
Like a garage Spector girl group, Pins are built to polarise with their ceaselessly workmanlike approach and seemingly contradictory impulses. Does their astonishing ordinariness make them unique, set the apart, or is this just some spectacular in-joke?
