Pest 5000 - "Cold Feet" 7"

Pest 5000 – “Cold Feet” 7”

Derivative!, 1996

Acquired: Love Garden Shotgun Room, Used, 2008

Price: $.25

Canadian group Pest 5000 operated from 1993-1997, and it really doesn’t get any more mid 90s than that. Their sound is like a warm blanket. I have a very strong connection to that time period in regard to music. It’s when I did a good deal of growing up, and when I started developing my taste in music. Not to say it was good taste, but I realized that the glossy mainstream pop that we listened to when the neighbors carpooled us to school was unappealing and that I’d much rather listen to the glossy mainstream alternative rock that co-dominated the radio waves in that post-Nirvana period. Gin Blossoms, Goo Goo Dolls, Everclear, Bush, Dishwalla. Those bands got scratched into my soul over the various summers of my youth. Pest 5000’s lo-fi indie pop was the alternative to the alternative. While they were also benefactors of the grungy atomic bomb that hit the reset button on popular music in 1991. “Cold Feet” is a fuzzy, catchy little number that deserves to be played on repeat. It isn’t as dated as a lot of the music from that period and sounds a lot like the bedroom pop being crafted by thousands of twentysomethings in 2014 (the more experimental, electro leaning b-side “Where the Moon is” doesn’t hold up nearly as well). Pest 5000 win extra points for having released one of the last 7”s on the bygone and beloved Harriet Records label. In the group’s five-year lifespan, they released one full length LP, an album of b-sides and remixes, and a handful of 7”s. It’s a respectable offering from a period where bands seemed to exist for a couple of 7”s and vanished off the face of the earth (or, more likely, were dissolved into other bands).

"X-ing Things," from the band's lone LP Interabang.