Guitarist, singer, and kalimba player Claudi Love has a couple different origin stories for her band, a bizarre and borderline cartoonish antifolk group called Pinc Louds. In an April interview with Ad Hoc, she says she met upright bassist Ofer Bear and percussionist Rai Mundo at a Day of the Dead party three years ago. But in an October 2018 interview with the website Madness to Creation, Love says she was busking at the Delancey Street subway station and got into a “musical standoff” with Mundo, who was playing bucket drums a little too close to her. Their confrontation quickly turned into a collaboration, and after that impromptu duet they became friends. Whichever story is real, Pinc Louds did frequently perform in that subway station—in tribute, they named their 2018 debut full-length Delancey St. Station (Tunnel Vision). If any band can redeem the word “quirky,” it’s these weirdos: they flitter around punk, folk, and doo-wop, with Love’s exaggerated, brassy vocals guiding the way. They create a loose, sprawling sound, as though they’d scavenged their instruments from a junkyard (and sometimes they could have—Bear is credited with upright bass and “peanut can”). And they lay on the whimsy in their rambunctious acoustic arrangements and lively performances. Love has described their shows as “immersive cabarets,” and they sometimes include actors, dancers, and puppeteers parading as garbage cans or lined up in a subway-train costume. In the mid-2000s, when Brooklyn’s music scene was more idiosyncratic than it is now, Pinc Louds might’ve blended into the background, but in 2019 they stand out—proving that strange and wonderful things can still grow in the cracks of gentrification’s pavement. v
New York antifolk troupe Pinc Louds tunnel toward the fringes on Delancey St. Station
