The Pink Spiders Play The Rothko November 10, 2005 Written by Nate Brown Photographed by Ramon Estevanell

The Sweet Smell of Success (almost)

There’s no rock venue in the city that resembles a womb more closely than
Rothko, which is fitting since the club’s played host to more than its fair share
of bands that have gone on to bigger stages and brighter lights. The Donnas,
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, The Dandy Warhols, and The Killers have all played
the dimly-lit, red rectangle of a room.

But for every band that makes it in the hard-knocks rock world, there are a
million and one failures. And then comes a band that seems so primed for success
that you can’t help but look at them skeptically. In New York City in particular,
where credibility is king, any band that’s too clean, too tight, too polished or
poppy isn’t going to sit well with a downtown audience.



Enter the The Pink Spiders, who played Rothko on November 10 th. A loud, fast, pop-punk trio, the Spiders took the stage shortly after 10 p.m. and jumped headfirst into a 45-minute set that you couldn’t help but bob your head to. Loud, unapologetic, and unquestionably poppy, this is punk in the vein of Noiseaddict, though comparisons to The Clash aren’t entirely unmerited (there’s a distinct Strummer quality to lead singer and guitarist Matt Friction’s pipes, though a Rivers Cuomo comparison seems somehow more fitting).

The most obvious standout of the evening was “Little Razorblade,” a guitar-driven pop song about (what else?) a young man’s crush. With an intensely appealing hook and an incessant beat, this is likely to be a radio repeat when The Pink Spider’s new album (their Geffen debut) Teenage Graffiti hits stores in the spring.

With The Pink Spiders, the ever-present and always-obnoxious question of where to file the music is somewhat tricky. Suffice it to say that both pop and punk rock can be fun and lively, even funny (think Jonathan Richman, Elvis Costello and most notably, The Ramones). Where the Spiders are concerned, one can’t help
but wonder if at least part of their new wave sensibility comes from their new producer, the legendary Ric Ocasek who sat behind the boards at NYC’s Electric Lady Studios during the recording of Teenage Graffiti (incidentally, Ocasek was also at the show).



Though the band plays and hollers like some of those bubblier pop and
punk acts of yesterday, their Rothko show was dampened by an intangible disconnect between the band on the stage and the fans on the floor. This may have had something to do with their slick threads or their tour bus (which was parked just outside of the venue and is larger and more luxurious than the vast majority the apartments on the Lower East).

If you were to cruise the Spiders’ new website and listen to some of
their tracks without ever having seen them live, you’d quickly get the
impression that this act is being groomed and ballooned by Gefffen as a solid prospect for a successful, mainstream debut. They seem a perfect candidate for a clever MTV-ready video, a slot on the Warped tour, and guest appearances on Veronica Mars or The Gilmore Girls. They’ve even been opening shows for Yellowcard, which may give you an idea of where they’re coming from and where they’re headed.

Of course, this kind of knee-jerk pigeonholing doesn’t do the band’s live show justice. Whether they’ve got too much dough to remain credible with an indie market that’s obsessed with organic, believable,
hometown-boys-make-good success is actually irrelevant because something tells me that Geffen’s got his eyes on bigger fish. Radio playability is understandably more important than indie credibility to a big label, and so be it. Scenesters can stand around and scowl at big league success, but that doesn’t change the fact that, at least for one night, these guys really rocked out at Rothko.

The Pink Spiders may no longer be starving artists, but that’d be a hard thing to hold against a band that played one hell of a mid-tour show. My guess is that the next time they hit the city, they’re not going to be at Rothko, but I’m sure we’ll be catching them onscreen and hearing them on our radios soon enough. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.