The Pamela Tiffins

Artist: The Pamela Tiffins
Genre: Rock/Pop
Styles: Progressive Rock
Label: Venus In Furs Records / MTunes

I was trolling eMusic last night and was clicking around in the progressive rock category and stumbled across this band. I was intrigued because they didn’t have a common progressive rock name, their CD cover wasn’t “trippy” in a kind of other worldly way, and their songs weren’t 10 minutes long. Nope, I think eMusic made a mistake when they were doing their “Styles” category. I sampled a few tracks and found that the music of The Pamela Tiffins was in no way progressive rock. The average song timed out at a little over 3 minutes, and the song titles were pretty sparse and somewhat generic in terms of content (i.e., “64th Street,” “Control Yourself,” and “Shake That Beat”).

After finding their My Space page, I found this this band is primarily an Italian duo (sometimes a trio) whose punk stylings are a fairly high-energy mix of thrashing, wailing, and spunk. But those things will only get you so far when it comes creating music of any quality. If you’re a music fan of some seriousness, you know that most bands cannot help being derivative; there’s only so much innovation possible within the confines of a particular genre. The Pamela Tiffins are no different from the multitude of other bands slogging it out in the public musical sphere, but there’s something a tad too derivative about their sound.

Case in point: “Burn, Baby, Burn” not only conjures up the 70s classic “Disco Inferno” with the title, but the actual sound owes a great debt to the Norman Greenbaum classic “Spirit In The Sky” with Love and Rockets “Bound for Hell” thrown in there for good measure (Listen HERE).

“64th Street”(Listen HERE)  has the distinction of having a song title that sounds evocative, but since there are probably millions and millions of 64th Streets in the world, it makes me wonder what they are talking about?  Could it be New York City? Could it be Des Moines? I simply don’t know. But I do know that the song is kind of catchy in pop-garage way. 

I don’t mean to slag this band or their songs, but this CD left a little cold. Perhaps their music is just not my “thing.” Perhaps I was in the mood for some prog and I got punkish sounds.  Perhaps I’m just an old man trying to like something that’s clearly meant for younger ears.

–PK