PEDICO are one of those bands I will recommend until one of us calls it quits. They’ve been a staple on Add To Wantlist for years now, and every new release leaves me with the same problem: how do I avoid writing the exact same review when, once again, the answer is simply, “this rules”?
We’ve covered their originals. We’ve covered their Beach Boys obsession. We’ve covered their oldies obsession. Truth be told, the line between all of those has always been deliciously blurry. PEDICO have spent well over a decade grabbing the greatest pop and rock ‘n’ roll songs ever written, throwing them in a basement with the Ramones, and seeing what survives. The answer is: pretty much everything.
Summer is here, and so are PEDICO. This time they’ve dedicated an entire mini-album to the girl groups that helped shape their DNA. I reached out to the band for some background. While they didn’t write the review for me this time around (they’ve done that before), they did send me something that explains the project better than I ever could:
“Long before punk had a name, there was a sound just as raw, just as urgent, and just as loud in its own way: the girl groups of the early ‘60s. The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Ronettes — groups who took heartbreak, longing, and teenage rebellion and turned it into three-minute pop perfection, all wrapped in Phil Spector’s towering Wall of Sound production.
PEDICO has always worn that influence loud and proud — the “teen beat” DNA runs through everything we do, from our surf-inspired originals to our Beach Boys covers. But the girl groups are where the real heart of it lives: the drama, the doo-wop harmonies, the sense that every song was a life-or-death teenage confession set to a beat you could dance to.”
There are ten tracks here, although Be My Baby sneaks in twice. Songs like Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, One Fine Day, and The Loco-Motion get the full PEDICO treatment: faster, fuzzier, and just scrappy enough to remind you that these songs were punk long before punk existed. My favorite surprise is There’s No Other Like My Baby, where the band briefly eases off the gas and display a level of nuance that only further shows how much love they have for these melodies. They don’t just cover these songs. They practically adopt them.
So what’s next for PEDICO?
“Back to the drawing board for some originals.”
Good. We’ll be here. And if they decide to throw another curveball before then, chances are we’ll love that too.
Add to wantlist: Bandcamp