Surfer Blood Stokes Crowd At Rock N Roll Hotel

All photographs by Frank Wilson for REVAMP.com.

H STREET -- At an Ultra Music Festival after party, Thomas Fekete (drums) met fellow founding members John Paul Pitts (lead vocals/guitar) and Tyler Schwartz (guitar/vocals) and formed the West Palm Beach, Florida-based rock band Surfer Blood.



Kevin Willams (guitar/vocals) soon joined the then indie group and together they swam into the darkly lit Rock N Roll Hotel on H Street last Tuesday, after temporarily escaping from their current tour with Death Cab for Cutie.



And a crowd filled with plenty of affable fans, including a guy who shared his Netflix password and other pertinent info with the band, readily devoured the 45-minute set.



Rock N Roll tends to struggle with vocal acoustics, but Pitts had everything tuned properly and his voice handily engulfed the audience. “Miranda” was the first crowd pleaser and really amped the crowd’s energy.


On Surfer Blood’s new EP, ‘Tarot Classics’, the band’s sound takes a turn towards more striking guitar riffs, which can be best heard on “Miranda” and the song they closed out the evening’s encore with, “I’m Not Ready.”


A few times throughout the set, the foursome also went into a sort of grunge mode in playing instruments just for the sheer pleasure of making them produce cool sounds. And the two methods that seemed to receive the biggest response from fans came from Schwartz tonguing his strings and Pitts using a drum stick.


According to the band’s Twitter feed, they will soon find themselves in California recording their second album with producer Gil Norton (The Pixies, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Eat World).


Surfer Blood is talented, getting better, and now apparently armed with a Netflix account. Expect no lack of inspiration from their next release and an album that introduces them to a crowd much larger than the 399 (roughly) people that came to H Street last week.