Living in Kin
"One day he just got behind the drums", explains singer and guitar player Aaron Pfannebecker, "and it sounded like us."
The boyish Pfannebecker, one half of Brooklyn-based duo Sisters, is speaking of his lanky kit-manner and musical partner Matt Conboy. What originally started as a standard-organization four-piece rock outfit--"Matt played guitar as well," recalls Pfannebecker via email exchange, "[and] these other players were kind of just halfassing it"--eventually distilled to its two man essence: "It was a little purer."
Purer in intent, perhaps, but sonically theres some dirt under those fingernails: Sisters, though generous with its hum-allday melodies, is really comprised of noise addicts. Conboy is one of the fuzz boxers at Death By Audio, which is a lot more than the Williamsburg DIY venue where the pair regularly rehearse; one of its many art collective incarnations is as an effects pedal maker.
The affiliation was evident several weeks prior, even as the twosome rocked an LP release party at an entirely different show space, opting to headline at underthe-Williamsburg-Bridge indie loft Dead Herring. As 70-odd sweaty fans moshed and pulled on tallboys, the lads spewed out a 10song set of fructose-coated crunchers while the J train intermittently rumbled past.
Pfannebecker, frequently oscillating on his instrument between two insistent chords, proved apt to let harmony tell the story, looking for lead-guitar intricacy on the fret board mostly when he needed an extra color to fill-out the percussion and off-and-on backing track. His voice, though appealingly untrained and occasionally fragile, proved equally capable (at least on rockers like Highway Scratch) of finding its highregister roughness. Make up something to come true, he howled, unsparingly puncturing the line that followed: Set it free before it breaks in two.
Conboy, who doubled on keyboard duty, showed a subtle and particular delicateness with his drumming even when he was going full force behind his compatriotall despite the sporadic concertgoer bashing into one of his cymbals a time or two when things got more frenzied. The timekeeper also got to display his DBA-worthy analog engineering skills, having built the bands rudimentary live-show illumination display: a single light that adjusts in brightness and duration according to when and how Pfannebeckers guitar is strummed.
Things are equally democratic on the compositional and recording end. It goes either way, reports the groups vocalist when asked whether material is deliberately