Like so many acts in small but bustling scenes, Little Rock indie rock quartet PETT — an acronym comprising the first letter of each of its four members’ names — is a melting pot of players from other local bands. The musicians that make it up — drummer Pat McGill, singer/guitarist Eric Cleveland, bassist Ted Gilliam and guitarist/backup singer Ty McCuin — used to be in I Was Afraid (McGill, Cleveland and McCuin) and Headcold (McGill and Gilliam) before both groups went on hiatus, and they currently play with Zilla (Cleveland), Stressor (McCuin), Peach Blush (Gilliam) and Unwed Sailor (McGill).
It’s a lot to keep track of, but PETT, which formed in 2019, doesn’t sound like the product of people who are distracted by other projects. It also doesn’t sound much like any of the other projects its members are or were involved with, most of which are quite a bit heavier. McCuin, in an interview with the Arkansas Times, cited the “dancey vibe and energy” of Minus the Bear as one of the band’s earliest influences.
PETT
“I remember back when we were writing some songs on the EP, the very first one, part of a goal of a song or two would be like, ‘Let’s write this song without using any distortion.’ Just to do something that we hadn’t really done before as musicians at the time,” McCuin said. “We definitely had a point of emphasis that we wanted it to be cleaner, a little bit noodly and a little more experimental and playful.”
After years of playing together, the genre classification the band has arrived at — half-jokingly — is “lazer jazz”; I might call it “dreamy emo with some strong jammy tendencies.” They remind me of Virginia outfit Turnover, if only they cut loose more. However you want to label PETT’s sound, it’s refined and lively, and they’ve honed it on “Whimsical Hymns,” the debut album they dropped on Friday after releasing two EPs — “PETT EP” and “Sounds” — in 2020 and 2022.
The most remarkable thing about PETT is the way they’re able to prioritize both vocals and musical intricacy. Their tangled, ever-evolving arrangements are sophisticated enough to be purely instrumental, yet melody and catchiness never get short shrift. Rather than reserving guitar solos for transitional moments, fluttery riffs and the well-matched voices of Cleveland and McCuin are sandwiched on top of one another almost constantly, somehow complimenting instead of competing with each other. “Lovesick Cowboy” and “Dana Scully” are album standouts.
While some bands have a principal songwriter that pens tunes by themselves and then brings them to the group for arranging, PETT’s approach is different, with the musical architecture being built collaboratively and then Cleveland adding melody and lyrics after the fact. I reckon that plays an important role in why the songs feel so naturally fleshed out. Moreover, McCuin attributes the cohesiveness of the instrumentation to the space in which most of the songs were written.
“My grandparents had this trailer up in Higden. It’s basically a house, but it’s a trailer in structure. It’s up by Greers Ferry and it’s very isolated, so we never had to really worry about sound ordinances or anything like that. We’d go up there and we would put all of our shit in the living room and we would all turn it on and go until like 11 at night … We’d do like 12 hours a day,” McCuin said. “We basically found a perfect mood and setting for us to write three or four songs at a time.”
Kat Roberts
The recording environment — Arkansas veteran musician Matthew Putman’s house in Fort Smith — was important, too.
“Something that’s dawning on me right now which I guess was just unspoken … is that the recording process that we had for this was the closest parallel to the experience of writing the songs that it could have been,” McCuin said. “We didn’t know exactly what to expect because it’s not exactly a studio — it is very much his home — but he knows how to engineer and produce in a way that we really needed to fully realize the ideas.”
You can find PETT on Instagram and Bandcamp and “Whimsical Hymns” is available wherever you stream your music.
