Nooks and crannies, or three peas under the mattress

What I’ve determined in making posts a little more personal to me is that I begin to think of each one as an attempt to rip open the thin veneer clouding my psyche and allow all to gaze at the wounds. Since this week has been a combination of dazzling euphoria and earth-shattering shame spiral the likes of which I haven’t ever experienced, I am not sure even my usual lengthy posts would be up to the challenge of putting my current psychological state on display. What I can do instead is seek to relieve irritations that are hindering my laser-like focus on the cataclysm. These irritations often get themselves lodged in nooks and crannies, usually within my ears, and the only way to get these peas out from under my mattress is to, well, frankly, upend the thing.

So here are three irritations from the cart:

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1. I’m not sure any of us saw this coming, that we would go from this:

to this:

I understand that Prince has experienced a great deal over the past 25 years, and that can change a man. Still, it is sad that in 2010, Prince’s output is not just a fight song for the Minnesota Vikings; it is a fight song that sounds like the unholy wedding of a Casio and seven cases of generic store cola. Yes, he has been through two divorces, the loss of a baby, a religious conversion, and significant health problems. Yet it is not an acceptable circumstance that this is what he is reduced to and what we are left with.

Though we face international and domestic crises of epic proportions, I cannot believe we are not doing more for Prince. There simply must be a way to get him back in a real studio with real equipment once again. Perhaps by doing so, we can help him rediscover what made Purple Rain so great (hints: not Apollonia, synth flutes, or football). Because this just shouldn’t be. Whatever this is. Shouldn’t. Be.

2. I reconnected with some old friends last night, my former bandmates in fact, at a show featuring the inimitable and always peppy Spouse. Near the end of the set, they played a personal favorite off the brilliant Relocation Tactics album:

At the 1:33 mark of the song, the band hits the bridge and the rhythm guitars begin to cascade in a rhythm that doesn’t remotely match the time signature. They run in 6-beat cycles through a field of backward solo notes and a continually rolling rhythm section. The key to the bridge is that while these cycles and the backward notes make you feel as if this is truly the widening gyre, that the center can’t hold, the bridge ends right on time and the musicians all know exactly where they are again, as if they never lost their place. Which they probably didn’t but it’s way more fun to pretend they did. Honestly, the way it makes the song spin out of control for a good 25 seconds is what has always made it stand out.

On Friday night, Spouse had a young and somewhat inexperienced musician sitting in primarily on bass but also on guitar for this part of their tour through the northeast. While he was very good on bass, he was less comfortable, clearly, on the guitar. It showed through mostly on their version of “Delta,” where he simply played the descending runs in the bridge as individual sets of four with breaks in between. It killed the movement. It killed the momentum. And yet I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who noticed.

Yet this took something important away from the song, something I’d like to have back. I know I can’t get it back, but consider this my personal plea to Jose Ayerve, singer, songwriter, and brains of the operation: please teach the correct widening-gyre hook to your guitar player (Kevin?) so that others on your tour route may experience the pure brilliance of the off-center bridge cascades. Everyone deserves to hear it – even if they don’t know it.

3. The release of a new Spoon album does usually release some level of pheromones in critics’ systems so that they are inclined, compelled, perhaps required to scrawl that album in their preliminary top 10 list for the year. I admit that Transference from front to back is not one of those albums I would want to put up in that lofty category, even at this early stage.

Many critics tend to agree with this assessment, including our own Marshall in yesterday’s post. The descriptions I’ve heard – “sounds great”, “half-finished”, “great production”, “lesser songwriting” – are fair to an extent. There is clearly a greater focus on creating an atmosphere than on creating the hooks. It also happens to be where my musical inclinations lie right now, so I may not mind it as much as others. Still, I do think much of the album lacks the palpable tension of a Gimme Fiction or the intensely smart songcraft of a Girls Can Tell. (True confession and perhaps another post for another time: I am decidedly not a Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga fan.)

But one song has all of that. Yet it gets cursory treatment, short shrift, in reviews from allmusic (“sinuous groove and spacy keyboards”) to Pitchfork (something about a “concussed haze” or something – honestly, that whole review needs a do-over). Why? I don’t know. But I’m begging those critics to put their headphones on and take another listen:

Yes, that is among the most noticeable aspects of the song from the get-go, the “spacy keyboard” effect, the “haze.” It really is only as stunning an effect as it is, however, when matched with the flim-flam drums and the shaken percussion. It’s like a broken moving walkway at an airport at 4 a.m. But that doesn’t get us to the honest and unusual songwriting decisions Spoon makes here, the ones no one mentions. Here the bass drives melody and song structure.

Yes, there’s bass in there, in snippets and fragments. Not the first time someone’s made this move to magical effect. In “Airbag,” the bass parts don’t appear to have a set repeated pattern, while they eventually settle into one here. However, when you first hear bass, at the 0:13 mark, it’s as maybe the last piece of a walk-down to accompany a guitar chord change. Without the guitar, the structure becomes harder to pluck from the mix and the studio wizardry, but the structure is still there. It’s simply implied instead of trumpeted. This is a songwriting choice you have to pay attention to hear, but it does pin down a structure without pinning down the ethereal atmosphere.

As the verse lopes along, so does the bass, creating a counterpoint melody to Britt Daniel’s vocals, building momentum until yet another wobbly section of the song, the asymmetrical chorus first evident at 0:33. The bass carries the chord change choice almost single-handedly with minimal help from Daniel. Yet between them they achieve significant uplift (ascending bass, ascending vocal melody, more urgent yelps) before settling into the more subtle part of the chorus. Again, bass plays the primary structural role here, establishing for the first time a descending chorus from A-major to F-sharp-minor to E-major (at the 0:41 mark), dancing along on different octaves as it maintains a deceptively active presence.

The second verse is on slightly more solid ground thanks to some additional sounds and an established bass part along with more urgent vocals. The chorus builds with the A-major cluster played by the keyboard (and, yes, layered heavily on your right side in the mix, as we know Spoon loves to do) and then hits an incredibly stark bridge whose rigid rhythms are enforced by straight sixteenth-notes as much as they are by the producers’ ability to remove the liquid background noise.

Those tense guitar-bass rumblings continue through a single cycle of verse before they drop out almost entirely in order to let Daniel’s vocals move off their established spot and float a little more freely in falsetto territory. Then when everything drops out and leaves Daniel alone with the keyboard and the percussion, it’s as if he’s looking for that stability again. And he has to wait a good bit for it, before that final A-major-F-sharp-minor-E-major descending chorus kicks in and brings the song almost all the way home.

It is that those beautiful pop-glorious A-F-sharp-E moments and other melodic moments occur in such free-floating production space – and that they are more often than not carried by the bass alone rather than a rhythm guitar or even a vocal suggestion – that makes the songcraft particularly special. That they occur in the song is a function of writing, and that they occur where you might not expect – in the bass line – points to a conscious songwriting/arrangement choice you can’t make while playing with the knobs on the board. There is real thought to how each part of the arrangement flows from the last and into the next, where there is space required, what elicits the most surprise.

These things are there for the taking throughout this song, and in greater amounts than perhaps on any other track on this album. Granted, I noticed them way better when I cranked the Subaru factory stereo to 35 volume out of 40 max, so it could be simply a matter of how I was listening and how everyone else is listening. But I find myself in absolute awe of the songwriting choices, combined with the spectacular production, and I just couldn’t let this week go without giving this song its due. It goes near the top of my own personal greatest hits list. And yet it’s not getting the kind of attention it deserves in any other quarters. The job fell to me.

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There. Perhaps I will be less irritated next week, what with those peas gone. Though I’m sure I’ll find a way to dig another nook or cranny, unpack what’s there, and relate it to my musical talent. Isn’t blog therapy grand???