Pela’s music is, first and foremost, about survival. The eleven tracks that make up their debut album, Anytown Graffiti, are all big hearted anthems about battered but resilient people who refuse to break in the face of adversity. As a little-band-that-could in the crowded New York City music scene it’s safe to say they’re writing from experience.

“New York City is such a cultural mecca and the pace at which it runs has a romance to it,” admits guitarist Nate Martinez on the phone from his Brooklyn apartment. “Then you get down here and actually try to live as musician and you realize how hard it is and you either stay and toughen up and become a survivor - or you leave. It’s the hardest place in the world to be in a band, without a doubt. There are a lot of well-off people in indie-rock and we’re finding out it’s not really built for working-class people. It can crush you but that’s almost inspirational in a way. We all have a massive love/hate relationship with the city.”

Examining the thin line between love and hate is at the core of frontman Billy McCarthy’s imagistic and riveting lyricism, best exemplified on scintillating opening cut “Waiting on the Stairs” in which he describes a relationship that veers from total devotion (“but we could jump off of a cliff into a wedding ring/ and if the heat pipes are shut off/ our walls would never sting”) to mutually assured destruction (“come admit it to me / that I have become your enemy”) in a voice that sounds like Morrisey’s windpipes filtered through Black Francis’ exaggerated vocal tics.

Pela’s music is equally dynamic, at times melding cooled-out mid-tempo pop with touches of serrated edge guitar work (“Lost to the Lonesome”), while occasionally employing the kind of martial rhythms and simultaneously menacing/transcendent guitar hooks that rival early-U2 for sheer sonic drama (“Song Writes Itself” feels like it came straight off of War). There’s something unmistakably epic about Pela’s approach and universal about their appeal. If they were a less inventive band - and frontman Billy McCarthy’s beautiful croon didn’t veer quite so frequently into barking-mad-dog mode during their louder moments - it would be easy to envision Pela churning out a whole album’s worth of pristine ballads like “The Trouble With River Cities” and making a calculated effort to market themselves as the new Coldplay. It’s undoubtedly this near-commercial viability that has led to mainstream press attention for the band – they were recently named by Rolling Stone magazine as an “artist to watch” in 2007.

For Martinez, however, who broke with his academic background in jazz to pursue the rock 'n' roll life, the Pela experience is the antithesis of calculated. “Going through the whole academic side of music can mess with your head,” claims Martinez. “A true jazz musician doesn’t think like a rock ’n’ roll musician, there can be a snootiness there. I learned a lot in school but at the same time I was forced into calculating everything. They try and force you through a tube so you pop out as a certain product; it’s doing a disservice to what the music of jazz was about in the first place. For me to do Pela I had to get rid of that whole frame of mind. It can certainly pull you out of the soul and spirit of playing music. If you’re forced into a cookie-cutter way of thinking it can stunt your growth. I just like playing music and not having it be so particular.”

Perhaps that’s why, on what’s largely a very tight and polished affair, it’s Anytown’s moments of breathless tightrope walking - the massive overdriven electric guitar riff and wordless scream that punctuate the close of “Drop Me Off,” or the rapid shotgun blasts of electric guitar notes that follow McCarthy’s description of “friendly fire that shoots itself” in “Song Writes Itself” - that cut closest to the bone.

Although Pela are far from household names at this nascent point in their career, Martinez is a man clearly energized by getting to pursue his rock 'n' roll dreams, no matter how far removed from MTV style glamour his life is at present (“If someone’s dumb enough to be complaining about having to eat shitty food and sleep on shitty floors when they’re on the road then they don’t really get what it’s about”). When he talks about making music it’s with the air of a man possessed by an all-consuming passion so strong it would seem tragic if his band wasn’t talented enough to make good on it (fortunately, they are).

“I think the power of music is just something that you tap into at whatever age and it doesn’t really change unless you let it,” offers Martinez when asked to give perspective on his band’s burgeoning career. “I still remember being 12 and a friend played me that Jimi Hendrix song ‘Fire’ and I just had to go out and buy a guitar the next day. From that point on I haven’t questioned my devotion to music. Going forward as things start to happen for the band, business and commerce start to coincide with art, and if your head’s not in the right place that can negatively affect you - at some point there’s that rocky period where you know commerce has to enter into things if you want to make a living from music. I don’t think the music ever gets tainted though. It’s empowering and exciting to get to make records and put them out there for people to hear. It drives you to just be better and do more. Shit, if you haven’t got purity with your music then you’ve got nothing.”
 

Pela's official website 

Pela's MySpace page

"Lost to the Lonesome" by Pela from Anytown Graffiti 

Pela performing the song "Cavalry" live:

COMING UP: Pela performs with Sexy Bang, Small Kitchen Appliances, The New Constitution, August 21. 400 Bar . 8 p.m. 18+. $8.