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Here is an article that appeared in FW Weekly on December 17th.

Trio of One frontman comes home with a new group and a new sound.

By Paula Felps

Contrary to rumor, Paul is not dead.

To the casual observer, Paul Averitt disappeared from the local scene in 1994 upon the disbanding of Big Big Drama. Eight years after the erosion of local legends Trio of One, however, the singer/guitarist is indeed alive and well and playing. This time around, the Fort Worth native is fronting Punch, a power-pop band that takes its cues from such acts as Cheap Trick and Matthew Sweet.

"This is more aggressive than a lot of what I've done in the past. We use a distortion pedal on just about everything, but it's still power pop," he says. "That is just what I do. It's what I love."

Averitt first planted stakes in Denton in 1990, along with the other members of the Cowtown powerhouse Trio of One, which subsequently disbanded. Nearly a decade later, Averitt believes he finally has assembled the "right" band and he is going public.

"I loved Big Big Drama. It was an extremely talented group of guys, but it got to the point where I felt overworked and underappreciated," he explains of the group's three-year ride on the local club rollercoaster. "So when I left the band, I wasn't about to throw a bunch of people together just so I could get out there and play. I felt like I'd been burned and I didn't want to go through that again."

Instead, Averitt took his time looking for the "right" players. In between, he played with such notables as David Garza and Sara Hickman and worked on Tiny Tim's final album, Girl. That effort led to more work with Tiny Tim's co-producer, James "Big Bucks" Burnett, who enlisted Averitt's talent on the recently released album, The Night We Taught Ourselves to Sing.

"Even when I was doing all that, Punch was still in the back of my mind as the primary thing," Averitt says. "I had the idea for this sound and knew it was what I had to do. It seems like it took forever to pull it all together."

After a few false starts with band members who didn't quite make the cut, Punch's lineup finally has gelled with guitarist Jon Lenzer, Arlington drummer Neil Saunders and bassist Mike Bowman. A few months of working out harmonies and melodies culminated in the release of a quickly recorded six-song demo cd last year, one that shows more promise than the average first disc despite its hurried approach. Meanwhile, a handful of rooftop gigs at Denton's Cool Bean's has created enough of a buzz to give the band sufficient fans to fill a club.

"Every time we play we get a real good crowd, so that's been encouraging. This kind of music has a broad appeal, and that shows up in the audiences we get," Averitt says."We're doing stuff that appeals to younger kids who are into the power pop of today, stuff like the Foo Fighters and Stone Temple Pilots. They love what we're doing. But at the same time, we're pulling in an older crowd that remembers Badfinger and Cheap Trick."

Punch straddles the line between those two factions, pulling them together with a series of killer riffs fronted by four-part harmonies and upbeat melodies. Although the band performs primarily original material, it isn't beyond pulling out the occasional obscure cover tune - such as Todd Rundgren's "Couldn't I Just Tell You" and Big Star's "September Girls."

"We're just now starting to work together on [writing] songs as a group, instead of just me doing the songwriting," Averitt says. "That's something I haven't done since Trio of One, and I'm looking forward to doing more of that. I want to make it more of a collaborative effort."

Most of all, Averitt is looking forward to making his new effort work. "It took me a long time to put this together because I wanted everything to work this time around. I really had a fear of it all falling apart on me again," he admits. "Now we're at the point where this feels really familiar and I think we're all pretty secure. So we're getting ready to hit it. Now's the time to make it work."