HEAVY PETTING “Adult Program” C20 (Dead Definition)

 

Seattle’s Heavy Petting has the kind of band name that makes you go “Hmm…,” like that C + C Music Factory song. (Fun fact: C + C Music Factory had a gig at a laser tag/arcade I was playing minigolf at, totally unbeknownst to me when I got there. This was at least a decade and a half after they’d achieved one-hit-wonder status.) Regardless of whether or not you can get the cover of that one NOFX album out of your head after starting in on this won’t matter. There’s very little the trio of Evan Anderson, Derek Blackstone, and Evan Easthope have to do with either heavy petting or pop punk, or, uh, late-1980s dance music. Unless you want to emphasize the “heavy.” They kind of have a “heavy” vibe.
 
What Heavy Petting do quite well is the ponderous post-rock thing, where the trio snake down mathy instrumental passages that pummel without overwhelming with volume. Adult Program is a rad EP that recalls some of my favorite netlabel releases back in the mid-aughts (see especially Lost Children’s run of post-rock/math-rock EPs). The guitar, while distorted on many occasions, does not bludgeon with metal intensity, so this isn’t some stoner rock knockoff. And the “post-rockness” of Adult Program picks up the pace periodically as well, so there’s some definite variation. This is just one of those good-old guitar/bass/drums trio EPs where the interplay works, the songs don’t overstay their welcome, and enjoyment is almost a certainty.
 
https://heavy-petting.bandcamp.com/
 
https://deaddefinition.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan