P.E.E. Return to Noise Pop and Find an Audience That No Longer Stands Back

P.E.E. have played only a handful of shows since reforming for the 30th anniversary of Now More Charm and More Tender at San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival this spring. What they found on the other side of that gap was not nostalgia so much as discovery.

“Everyone sort of stood back in the ’90s,” says singer and guitarist Kelly Green. “People didn’t think it was cool to be enthusiastic, so we never really knew what they were thinking.” Now, she says, audiences arrive early and stay to talk with the band and with each other between sets. Some bring gifts: a three-dimensional yarn model of the group’s heart-with-knives logo, fan art made from colored tape, hand-painted renditions of the album cover.

The attention is strange for a band whose small discography is deliberately difficult to parse. P.E.E.’s songs are packed with arcane in-jokes and a taste for the absurd, buried under skronky riffs and warm tape saturation. The opacity was less a calculated aesthetic than a necessity. The quartet pressed its debut 7-inch independently, photocopying jackets and drawing individual covers with crayons in the van during eight-hour drives between shows. When there was no merch budget, they bought secondhand shirts at thrift stores and screen-printed them on the road.

That elusiveness has since become an asset, drawing a cult following of younger music obsessives. The debut has been mastered and repressed, and the band has located the original master tape for The Roaring Mechanism, a record so poorly mixed they could barely hear their own voices on it. Bassist Tiber Scheer described hearing the tape as like a baby putting on glasses for the first time.