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Pennikurvers - Pennikurvers (1995)

Artist: Pennikurvers

Author: Sarah

Date: 01/12/2024

Listen: YouTube

I wrote this review on Rateyourmusic many years ago, caught up in the excitement of having found my very own copy of their EP. It's sort of about the EP, but mostly it's about thinking about how that long-forgotten band you found once was active, and had fans who didn't come to them through their own indiepop archaeology. I don't listen to the Pennikurvers all that much anymore these days; but whenever I do happen to think about them, I feel the same way I tried to capture in this review all that time ago.

In the liner notes, a fan of the band talks about the namesake of the band, Penni Kurvers. We don't learn much about Penni, just that she was in a yearbook from the 1970s. But it's really not who Penni was that mattered to the Pennikurvers, it was the ideal of her. To them, her image "felt like sometime in an early fall," and they felt enough of a kinship to the ideal they had of her that they chose to name the band in her honor. They admit that Penni has "little if no idea at all" that the band is making music under her name, but that doesn't really matter, does it?

Ironically, our relationship to the Pennikurvers is much the same as their relation to Penni Kurvers. We listen to the Pennikurvers without knowing anything about them, aside from names. None of the members know who we are; they might not even be aware there's anyone who still listens to their sole release. There's only two pictures of them out there, that I know of. One is on their last.fm page, and only has lead singer Emily Dalton in frame; the other is on the back cover of the EP, and as far as I can tell that has not been digitized. So we're left to project ourselves onto their music.

It's far too easy to just think of the Pennikurvers as just these three songs, as that's all we're ever going to get from them. But for those who are fortunate enough to have a physical copy, the liner notes smash that idea. Their fan prefaces the EP by saying "this is the first release from pennikurvers, time will only tell if it will be their last," concluding their note to the listener by saying "let's hope that it won't be."

The little scrap of paper that that's written on does a lot to me. It expands my conception of the Pennikurvers as these three songs into that of a flesh and blood band. They were an actual band, they had fans who adored them more deeply than we ever will, they had an arsenal of songs that no one is ever going to hear again, because no one ever thought to record them. All that remains is 11 and a half minutes, three songs, and two paragraphs about how they were going to change the world.

Do you think their fans still remember them?