It’s late on a Tuesday night in early January at Great Scott, and Anushka Pop are setting up for what is to be one of a batch of performances the trio have booked to drum up interest in their first EP, Akathena (Sassy Boy). Unfortunately, nobody seems to have gotten word of the gig: as the band hit the stage, only a few straggling fans assemble, one snapping pictures. He appears to be working for either the band or the club. But Anushka Pop don’t seem fazed by the low turnout: sporting a black “Allston Rock City” tee, drummer Chris Welch counts out the first song and the band spring to life. Johnny Arguedas playfully holds his bass higher than is generally considered cool and then snaps it back into place for effect. Frontman John Soares’s eyes are clenched behind clunky, Elvis Costello–style specs as he teases a thorny solo from his guitar. His head-bobbing, eye-rolling, ’60s-pop-star delivery falls somewhere between mockery and tribute. During a break between songs two-thirds of the way through the set, Soares jokes that the band should probably get back to it because “a half-dozen people are waiting” for them.
When a more substantial crowd shows up exactly a month later, last Friday for the band’s New England Product gig at Bill’s Bar, there’s little change in the intensity of the performance. Still representing “Rock City” in his black tee, Welch chokes up high on his sticks for “Carry On,” then propels the mellow harmonies of Arguedas and Soares with swift, economical drum rolls. The volume of the guitars occasionally renders Soares’s words indecipherable. The band’s bustling, hyperactive pop is going over well. At the end of “Why I’m Here!”, a punchy, parents-just-don’t-understand number, Soares looks pleased as Welch raises a broken drum stick for all to see.
When we meet a few nights after the Great Scott gig, at Remington’s in Boston, the band aren’t complaining. “We had heard that that might happen,” Arguedas says of the low turnout. He chalks it up to a slow Tuesday. Soares says he doesn’t mind small crowds anyway: “With six people, it’s easier to connect with each person individually.”
The trio found one another at the end of 2000, when they were all working at the same dot-com. Soares was playing the open-mike circuit and toying with the idea of an acoustic career — an experience he doesn’t remember fondly. “There were a lot of people getting on stage and singing about their feelings.” He decided to assemble a group with Welch, a one-time drummer for local hardcore band Cops on Crutches who shared his affinity for late-’70s/early-’80s power-pop acts like the Paul Collins Beat and the Raspberries as well as that pillar of all things pop, the Beatles. Welch enlisted Arguedas — whose credits include a Beatles cover band who played exactly one gig — after running into him at a Brett Rosenberg show. The trio have been kicking around the local scene ever since, playing shows throughout the area, including opening for Ted Leo at the Middle East during the DNC. Yet they’ve released only a three-song demo and the recent Akathena, both on their own Sassy Boy label.
