On Thursday, The Rivoli was one stop in Vancouver band Peach Pit’s Canadian tour. The evening was packed with good music and company.
Peach Pit consists of a quartet who recently gained a small cult following online, specifically on their bandcamp website. The adjective “weird” is an accurate way to describe the band. Like cartoon characters, they wear the exact same outfit at every show. They call their fans “daddy.” They unabashedly bust into “dad-like” dance moves in public. But that’s the charm of Peach Pit. With this band, you’re guaranteed a fun, raucous show.
What a riot their set was. Peach Pit opened with a reverberating rock rendition of their lo-fi song “Drop the Guillotine.” From the first strum of that opening chord, the crowd was hooked. People were moshing in the centre of the packed room, and others closer to the stage were shouting every word.
Then, barely three songs in, Christopher Vanderkooy (the red-turtlenecked guitarist), Neil Smith (yellow-and-purple clad frontman), and Peter Wilton (bassist in orange overalls) put their instruments down in unison and stage-dived into the crowd. The drummer, Mikey Pascuzzi, kept the beat going as the crowd lifted the other musicians overhead, then back onto the stage as they picked up where they left off.
In between, Smith threw in anecdotes, like “a new snack recipe for salted nuts called Daddy Spicy Nut.” Smith also prefaced songs with their back stories, like how he went backpacking in Indonesia and met a guy who offered him crystal meth off his knuckles.
Exhausting their material from the 2016 release, Sweet FA, and recent full-length album Being So Normal, the four returned for a one-song encore to the tune of Pixies’ “Hey,” a classic that the crowd joined into until the very last second of the band’s set.
Peach Pit and their three stellar openers made it feel like a warm summer evening inside The Rivoli. Throats raw from cheering and legs wobbly from four straight hours of fun, it must have been jarring for fans to step outside the venue to a chilly October night. But the music lives on, and so does summer with Peach Pit.
