When I saw Please Do Not Fight on White Crate’s list of music to review, my eyes literally, inadvertently, widened. Please Do Not Fight? The South Bay band we last heard from in, what, 2013? The very first band to invite me to review their show back when I was a brand-new journalist at the local weekly in TWO THOUSAND AND NINE?
Yep, it’s them. Though all members have moved on both figuratively and literally since parting ways in 2011, bandleader Zen Zenith, like a lot of people, took some pandemic downtime to start experimenting with new music again, resulting in pastpresentfuture : part 2.
Calling this a “new” EP feels weird, because it doesn’t sound new at all. It picks up where PDNF left off – and that’s not a bad thing. It sounds exactly like the South Bay scene in the early 2010s, which I realize is a statement that’s only going to make sense to a few people, but to give you an idea: yelping vocals, abrupt verse-chorus transitions, and soaring guitar solos (all hallmarks of a certain splinter of suburban indie rock around that time). A few seconds in and I felt like I was being scooped up through a wormhole back to the earliest part of my twenties, back to Homestead Lanes, the Art Boutiki, or whatever random word-of-mouth spot the bands on a bill had turned into a venue for the night. It’s a welcome blast of nostalgia from a band that provided the bedrock to a fleeting, but meaningful, music scene that still lingers in the heart of so many Bay Area music fans.
