Echo Curio was uncomfortably packed, with some familiar faces but many more strangers who crawled out of the woodwork to see this month’s cover girls and a couple of other lo-fi “next big thing”s (Best Coast and Real Estate). I felt like I was staring at the living embodiment of Zeitgeist—up close and in person! More blonde than the fans at a Prussian Blue show, Pearl Harbor definitely look like the coolest band in town. The girls are so cute that it’s painful, and the singer can sway. For all the attention the girls get, though, the bassist is probably the most gorgeous of the bunch. He dresses and grooms his hair like a kid in a Sunday School class, and I found myself fixated on his steely-eyed snarl for most of the performance.

Much of Pearl Harbor’s sonic palette seems cribbed from Ariel Pink, so if you’ve heard Haunted Graffiti you have a good foundation for imagining these new Southern California dreamers. They’re pretty good. The bassist is not only a babe but rock-solid in the way that Mike Mills was for eighties-era REM, and the forest-pixie on guitar plays those tropical, circular, breezy spring-reverb licks that are hella popular in the scene right now. The singer mimics Courtney Love as she wails along, off-key and slack-jawed, to pre-recorded harmonies.

Their songs were pleasant. They all blended together, though, before drifting out of my head without so much as an echo. The music just doesn’t compare to the visage. Watching them, I was reminded of a quote from MacBeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage …a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Still, it’s got to be pretty rad for them, having their fingers on the pulse of a whole neighborhood and all.

—Geoff Geis