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Pleasure Leftists -- from left, Kevin Jaworski, Halley Morris, Mark Terveen and Steve Peffer -- will play a record-release show on Saturday at Now That's Class in Cleveland.
A lot of musicians start a band with the idea of “doing something different.”
It went through Steve Peffer’s mind often when he set out to start a new band with Kevin Jaworski. They’d both been doing Nine Shocks Terror, a legendary Cleveland hardcore band renowned for its aggressive sound and incendiary show.
“We’d both been doing it and wanted to try something new,” says Peffer, who sang in Nine Shocks. “Not beat people over the head with aggression.”
Not just that – he also traded in the microphone for the bass. Though both he and Jaworski had sang before, they wanted someone else. They practiced together, along with drummer Mark Terveen, for months before finding a singer, all while resisting the temptation to take the microphone.
“I found someone who was DJing with me at WCSB,” he says, referring to the Cleveland State University radio station, 89.3/FM. “I just liked her show – she talks in these strange, bizarre voices, and then you meet her and she’s this tiny, really quiet girl. Not at all what you’d expect.”
But Halley Morris — a fan of synth pop, new wave and Italian disco -- proved to be just right for a band that consciously set out to play against expectations.
Hail Pleasure Leftists, a band that firmly embodies the sensibilities of postpunk. You could call “postpunk” a genre, one mined in the late-1970s and early-‘80s by bands such as The Fall and Joy Division, Gang of Four and This Heat. But postpunk was always more about approach and attitude than sound.
“It’s one of the most free-form movements in music,” says Peffer. “It’s rock music, but also anti-rock, in that you are going against the conventions.”
You hear that on Pleasure Leftists’ new self-titled EP – a disc that finds common ground between gloom and beauty, between a jagged guitar, a melodic bass and hypnotic drums.
At 9 p.m. Saturday, Pleasure Leftists will do a record release show at Now That’s Class, 11213 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. $5. Call 216-221-8576.
It’s more evident in the band’s live show. Morris’ stage moves jump wildly and freely from a dance to a fit to a seizure – all glued together by an evocative, emotional moan-and-croon-and-shout singing style.
“I had no idea what to expect when I asked her to join,” says Peffer. “I didn’t even know her.”
That made touring a bit difficult – like an intruder jumping into a long-time friendship between Peffer and Jaworski.
“It made it tough at first, but that’s what made it interesting,” he says. “After a while, bands start becoming like cabaret shows – and this one, so far, has been the opposite of that.”