Some Thoughts On The Spinanes

[So: I'm on a listserve for contributors to Dusted, and we've been taking turns posting things about artists we're fond of. This was my contribution, which I figured I'd post here.]

Eventually, I’ll talk your ear off about The Spinanes. For the most part, when I say TheSpinanes, I’m talking about the original lineup: Rebecca Gates on vocals and guitar, Scott Plouf on drums. (The albums Manos and Strand; the singles collected on the EP The Imp Years.) But really, I’m also fine with talking about the version of the band that recorded the last full-length made under that name, Arches and Aisles – essentially, Gates and a host of Chicago post-rock types, several of whom would also show up on her sole solo effort to date,Ruby Series. (There’s also a 7″ of Rolling Stones covers that’s utterly fantastic; if memory serves, Ted Leo was a touring Spinane for a little while,. though I never got to see that lineup.) But — I’m getting ahead of myself.

I went to a show at the Westbeth Theater Center in 1996, where The Spinanes played on a bill with Versus and Elliott Smith. I’d heard some good things about them from friends. I was in my second semester of college then, and was probably at my most musically intolerable: lots of straight-edge hardcore*, lots of crappy alt-rock. I cite the show as life-changing even though I don’t remember much about the bands that played — I think Smith was the artist on that bill that was the most musically striking to me. It did lead me to pick up Strand a day or two later, though, and…

…I can’t quite explain just what it is that makes me love this album. The Gates/Plouf duo sounds tight and fantastic; Gates’s lyrics are smart and blistering and delivered amazingly. It’s the sort of album that sounds fresh to me whenever I hear it: some new facet of an arrangement makes itself apparent; some new hook arises; some new lyric strikes me as amazing. I’m not sure exactly where I’d place it, but it’s a relatively constant presence on personal top 5 lists, something I can’t say for most records.

(Manos? Also terrific. Arches & Aisles? Totally worth it. Imp Years? Has “Hawaiian Baby,” for God’s sake.)

Gates has a new album due out in May on 12XU. Am I stupidly excited to hear it? Yes I am.

Also, one of these days, I’m going to post my circa-’98 interview with Gates (done for a piece for my college paper, and for my zine**). I did get to chat with her about a year ago, and saw her at Europa last summer. Still highly, highly recommended.

*-i.e. to the point where musical talent ran second to how straight-edge you were. Remember the ’88 revival? I do! Oh, do I ever.
**-profile ran in the paper; full interview ran in the zine.

Porcelain Raft, Best Music Writing, Sara Levine, and more

Many things to report over here, including what looks to be a successful Kickstarter campaign for the 2012 edition of Best Music Writing. But many other things are in progress (including this reading, which all of you should check out), and so instead I’ll leave you with a link to this Porcelain Raft interview that I did for The L Magazine today. (Because the new Porcelain Raft album is, in fact, quite good. Hey, here’s a video from it.)

Unless You Speak From Your Heart from Porcelain Raft on Vimeo.

 

On Poor Moon

Many years ago, I ended up directing a video for a Seattle band called Crystal Skulls. (If you’re not familiar with the band in question and your tastes in music run towards pop with smart, occasionally biting lyrics, you could do far worse than checking out one of their two albums.) It was an interesting experience: it ended up falling into the category of videos that didn’t feature the band at all, and there were a couple of aspects of planning for the shoot that…well, let’s just say that I learned a couple of things for the next time I undertake such a project.

Where I’m going with this (hey, look: me digressing. Imagine that) is that singer/guitarist Christian Wargo now has a new band, Poor Moon; they have an EP coming out on Sub Pop in March. Admittedly, the guy’s been keeping busy: he’s also a member of an obscure folk-rock outfit called Fleet Foxes. But as a fan of his work as a songwriter, I’m glad to hear that this group exists. The MP3 that Sub Pop has up now? Also pretty catchy.

In Which Music Is Written About (part two: profane punk edition)

A couple of months ago, my friends Diehard were playing an afternoon CMJ show. The band following them had a less-than-enticing name: Diarrhea Planet. A couple of the folks from Diehard advised me to stick around, and I’m glad that I did: DP’s sound recalled a number of irreverent, anthemic punk bands I enjoyed listening to ages ago. Turns out theirs is a sound that one can appreciate just as much at 35.

At the show in question, I picked up their album Loose Jewels; more recently, I wrote about it for Dusted.

(Also: that video’s probably NSFW. If you are going to listen, you might want to have headphones on.)

Zine Postscript, 10 January 2012

When I first started thinking about doing a zine in the mid-90s, two of the zines that inspired me most were Rumpshaker and Anti-Matter*. And pretty much since late last month, I’ve intended to use that as a point to link pieces by the editors of each: Eric Weiss’s interview with Carrie Whitney on the followup to her excellent All About Friends compilation**, and Norman Brannon’s essay “The Death of a Music Writer: A 20-Year Exit Strategy.” It’s always a fine thing when the writers who said smart, inspirational things about music (and why you should care about music) seventeen years ago are doing it just as much today, you know?

*-the third critically important zine for me growing up was Trustkill, for the record.
**-which featured Botch covering “Rock Lobster,” which was utterly awesome. See above.

Cities & Critics

I’m re-reading Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City for one of the book groups I’m in, and I figured it might make sense to delve into Kevin Avery’s biography of Paul Nelson, Everything Is An Afterthought. (Robert Christgau points out in his review of Avery’s book that Nelson was the inspiration for Chronic City‘s Perkus Tooth.) So far, I’m through the first part of Nelson’s book — the biography takes up about 180 pages, and is followed by a collection of Nelson’s criticism. Highly recommended so far, though also heartbreaking, frustrating, sometimes triumphant, sometimes maddening.

And now, some cheery holiday melodies

Another Christmas finds me in scenic New Jersey, along with family, beagles, and a pair of Krampuses hanging from the tree. My reading material: Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (shades of years ago, where I’m pretty sure Needful Things was my Christmastime reading.) Here’s hoping the holiday season finds you well.

Lists! About Books!

Two more 2011 lists for your consideration, both at Vol.1: my favorite 2011 books read in 2011, and my favorite non-2011 books read in 2011. In-depth thoughts on both are at the links, but here are the lists:

-2011-
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Little, Brown and Company)
Vanessa Veselka, Zazen (Red Lemonade)
Justin Taylor, The Gospel of Anarchy (Harper Perennial)
Colson Whitehead, Zone One (Doubleday)
Nathan Larson, The Dewey Decimal System (Akashic)
Ellen Willis: Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press)
Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (Greywolf)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (Farrar Strauss & Giroux)
Jeff Sharlet, Sweet Heaven When I Die (W.W. Norton)
Lisa Wells, Yeah. No. Totally. (Perfect Day Publishing)

-Non-2011-
John Williams, Stoner (NYRB Classics)
Alexander Chee, Edinburgh (Picador)
Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (The Dorothy Project)
Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill (Penguin)
Dennis Cooper, The Sluts (Da Capo)
Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (Grove Press)
Michael Kimball, Us (Tyrant Books)
Michael Kimball, Dear Everybody (Alma Books)
Rick Moody, The Four Fingers of Death (Back Bay Books)
Paul Harding, Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press)
Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)

Ah, reissues

I hadn’t realized that a pair of Three Mile Pilot albums had been reissued on vinyl by Hi-Speed Soul until I found myself browsing through the “T” section at Generation earlier this week. And now I know, and have duly purchased Chief Assassin of the Sinister.

I also picked up Temporary Residence’s Bitch Magnet collection the other week at Sound Fix, and am slowly making my way through that. I’ll admit that I’d known of the group primarily as Sooyoung Park’s pre-Seam band; so far, I’m enjoying exploring their discography, which is heading to some unexpected places. (It’s also prompting me to revisit Seam’s body of work, which is never a bad thing.)

2011: The Building of Lists

So hey, the year 2011 is nearing its end, which tends to mean that it’s time to muse on the year’s artistic offerings in concise form. In other words: there will be year-end lists. And so: here are a few of mine, with more to come. (I’ll have a couple of pieces up at Vol.1 in the next week, along with some thoughts on noteworthy live music at Big Other. Links will be posted as the pieces appear.) For now, here are two:

My ten favorite albums, along with some thoughts on the year in music, are now listed at Dusted.

And I contributed to a list of literary gift ideas at The Contextual Life, along with a number of notably NY-area lit folks.

New Fiction at Joyland: “An Old Songwriter’s Trick”

At Joyland, I have a new short story up, titled “An Old Songwriter’s Trick.” This is how it begins:

The week Owen left New York was one of sweltering humidity reaching down to enrapture us, swaddle us, leave us all reaching for insufficient comfort. We assumed Owen was alone in the task of loading a truck, of carting boxes and disassembled furniture down flights of stairs and into a double-parked van. It was a week of sweat-stained shirts, of dodging brownouts, of foregone conclusions about the city and about what constituted comfort demolished. Owen was leaving us, and few among us were sad to see him go.

Keen-eyed readers may notice that it shares a character with another story of mine, “Dulcimers Played, Strings Played.” That is not coincidence; essentially, this story originally began its life as a sort of prelude to something much longer I’d like to write. As part of it, I needed to explain how one particular character ended up in a particular place; from there, this story arose. The longer work is as yet unwritten (as a couple of my favorite novels from this year may have rendered the concept moot); we’ll see, I suppose.

(Also: immense thanks to Brian at Joyland for running the story.)

On Jóhann Jóhannsson

I’ve been a fan of the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson since around the time I heard his 2004 album Virðulegu Forsetar, a magnificent work that slowly unfolds from burgeoning drone to expansive bliss. And more recently, I’ve been listening semi-obsessively to a piece called “The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World,” which comes from his soundtrack to a film called The Miners’ Hymns.

All of this is preface to say that I chatted with Jóhannsson for The Rumpus via email over the course of a few months, and the end result is now online.