BAND OF THE WEEK: LAST REMAINING PINNACLE

BAND OF THE WEEK: LAST REMAINING PINNACLE

We’re not saying that Brian Eno should do the world a favor by becoming familiar with the music of LAST REMAINING PINNACLE. We’re just saying that Brian Eno could do the world a favor by becoming familiar with the music of Last Remaining Pinnacle.

Perhaps the most oft-repeated (and unattributable) truism in weirdo music has it that the incomparable Mr. Eno once declared that the first Velvet Underground album only sold 1,000 copies … but each of those thousand purchasers then formed their own band. It’s a beautiful sentiment – one that speaks to the immediate impact of The Velvet Underground in particular and the transformative power of rock and roll in general.

But the math is changing, and this is a good thing. We imagine that, at most, only half of those thousand purchasers started a band (our own personal, most generous accounting has us topping out at #344). The other half just put on dark shades, smoked cigarettes and looked cool (yours is no disgrace – this too is important behavior).

And both the band-forming half and the cool-looking half became older brothers and sisters, roommates and record store employees, and eventually, mothers and fathers. The influence is unyielding, generational, an unending linear path that turns out not to be linear at all but rather a spherical, universal whole.

Which brings us back to Last Remaining Pinnacle.

Download “Students of the V.U.” by Last Remaining Pinnacle.

The Virginia Beach-based duo create their cosmic chaos with the full acknowledgment of the textbooks written by their predecessors, and they’re unafraid to scribble their own notes in the margins – not only on the Velvets, but the Voidoids, Void, Voivod and perhaps The Violet Hour, too. But as your thirty-third rotation of the track above will prove (and trust me, you’ll be spinning “Students of the V.U.” at least that many times), Last Remaining Pinnacle are enrolled in the advanced level courses as well. Among their studies: the use of power for power, adaptation and survival in the midst of tribal warfare and the relentless human desire to climb the holy mountain – indeed, to reach the Last Remaining Pinnacle.

Listen: Last Remaining Pinnacle will be releasing this song on vinyl, as a split seven-inch with fellow eardrum-assassins, Pan-Galactic Straw Boss, coming this April from Custom Made Music.

Custom Made Music is a very notable label for you, dear readers, as they’ve already released great music from Austin Psych Fest performers past (Screen Vinyl Image, Ringo Deathstarr) and will soon do the same for future psych veterans (an upcoming EP from The Sky Drops), in addition to lots of other amazing things (like the highly Apes-approved debut from Pete International Airport). It’s a great label with much to explore …

… but don’t take my word for it – take it from someone else! You should already have the great “When the Sun Hits” blog – your resource for all things shoegaze and dream pop, of course – on your reading radar. Just yesterday, the Sun Hits crew posted a great record label spotlight feature on Custom Made Music, including a five-song, label sampling download. Apparently, we’ve tapped into some sort of universal mind blog vibe … apparently, we’re all students of the V.U.

“But what I mean to say is that you can afford to expose yourself to uncertainties in art that you wouldn’t allow yourself in real life. You can allow yourself to get into situations where you are completely lost, and where you are disoriented. You don’t know what’s going on, and you can actually not only allow yourself to do that, you can enjoy it.

It’s part of the stimulus of being an artist. That has, for me, a powerful function. But it’s precisely because it is an unreal activity, and it’s an activity that eventually doesn’t matter. In the sense that if you fuck it up it doesn’t matter at all, nobody cares. It doesn’t make any difference to anybody, and whatever artists try to believe, that is really the measure of their importance: that their mistakes are often more interesting than their intentions.”
– Brian Eno, “Punk” interview, sometime in 1976