Spose: Dankonia

Sam

Welcome to Dankonia

Spose writes an album for Outkasts everywhere

Musical costumes are nothing new in Portland. Just ask the folks doing Clash of the Titans, who don a couple of new bands every week.

This Halloween, though, Spose wears a costume only to subsume it into the Preposterously Dank empire with the release of Dankonia, whereby Wells, Maine’s most famous rapper lays it down on top of production originally used by Outkast, though not only Stankonia.

Which gives him something of a headstart. Obviously, he’s got some great stuff to work with (he’ll tell you all about CeeLo’s contributions), and Spose is a lyricist and rapper who shines even when there isn’t much to work with at all.

Just don’t tell him he sounds like Coolio, as did his booking agent, Peter Schwartz, when Spose finally told him things weren’t working out. “Coolio,” out for just about a year as a preview of the second free album to be released by Spose this year thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, is everything he does well: tight rhymes, personally oriented and self-effacing, breaking down at the finish into what essentially becomes an intimate conversation.

“Three albums, two mixtapes, dense-ass verses and I sound like Coolio? C’mon.” No, not hardly.

Spose does his best over the 20 tracks here, actually, to sound like no one else, succeeding most when he’s residing squarely within the Maine we all know and love. “16 Counties”  is tremendous, incorporating not only a chorus of voices singing the Maine counties song, scratched and crabbed, but also more smart references to Maine political figures and celebrities than should reasonably fit into less than four minutes.

My favorite? “They didn’t think the kid he could flow/ Now I look like a man, like Olympia Snowe.” Or maybe: “Fuck Paul LePage / There’s no way he could be from where we’ve all been raised / He needs to shut his fast face and lick the balls for days / While I’m robbing every Marden’s until we all get paid.”

But even a very selective list of great rhymes from Dankonia would take up too much space to undertake. The record is a clinic in simile. If it weren’t that so many were on the order of “This is second coming, like redoing a porn take,” from “Twerking at a Funeral,” I’d recommend it for high school English. 

As it is, “Bombs over Syria” is a must-listen for just about anyone. With early electro-clash production, and a chorus that’s impossible to shake, this is Spose at his most dead serious even in a concise 1:20. “Cure for cancer, cure for AIDS, you know they got that shit locked away,” he clips, nearly breathless, “they’ll give it to you man, just not today / Pharmaceutical companies say you got to pay.”

And it’s hard to argue with this: “Every time they make a bomb you know they’re getting paid / Let me sell you fear, cuz money’s made when you’re afraid.”

Money, and how it’s made, is a recurring theme here. If you’re interested in Spose’s journey to major-label-land and back, there’s plenty to gnaw on, including “Elevators,” where he delineates the moment he found out he’d been dropped, while grabbing an iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and “Broke as Me,” where you learn all you need to know about the cutthroat nature of the business: “They don’t give a fuck if eat lunch or tonight I die.”

Ouch.

But Spose never really comes close to wallowing. In fact, “Get Up Get Out” is the closest to the PDank ethos. A rallying cry to himself, it’s the Spose credo from “Can’t Get There from Here” – “doesn’t matter what your zip code is, just do work” – poked, prodded, and explored. “There’s a race going on and you’re out of it,” he drawls with disgust, “You’re lazy as fuck / You couldn’t pay me enough to live the life your live buddy / You got so much free time you make me think time isn’t money.”

It is, though, and no one knows it better. And no one is doing more to squeeze the most out of every minute than Spose. Thirty-four tracks released this year, every one of them demanding to be heard.

The Cambiata: Into the Night

Sam

Step into the night

Cambiata release a dark and intriguing debut

I’m the first to admit that it can be hard to follow the all-ages scene. So many bands come and go in so many far-flung venues, only those fully immersed in the scene could hope to speak confidently about the brightest new prospects. I’m not that guy.

I can tell you, however, about the cream that rises to the top. The Cambiata are populated with talent that has burned brightly enough to be noticed by anyone paying attention over the past five years. Guitarist Sean Morin and drummer Daniel McKellick were once among one of the best young bands in Maine with Barium, a hardcore outfit that was part of an all-ages and DIY explosion in the late-’90s. Singer Chris Moulton was more recently frontman for In the Arms of Providence, whose Left My Voicebox in a Seaside Town was one of 2005’s very best releases, before the band imploded, and his team-up with Even All Out’s former frontman Billy Libby set the scene’s heart a-flutter for about three months just after that.

Together, the trio are joined by bassist Stan Dzengelewski and guitarist Miguel Barajas, partners in Originel, to form a five-piece brain trust of heavy, aggressive music influenced by facets of hardcore, jazz, emo, synth-pop, and rock. They ask a lot of their listeners, but if you’re looking for something you haven’t heard before, as likely to beat your face in as sing you to sleep, Cambiata are your band.

Their debut full-length, Into the Night, released with the help of promoters/management Burning Baltimore, smolders with a desire to be different, to go places you haven’t been, to shine with such luminescence you’ll be caught unable to either stare intently or look away. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they come off like pre-schoolers yelling, “look what I can do,” from the playground monkey bars, but, as with the toddlers, you watch and listen because you’re ready to be impressed.

Stealing from the school of Mr. Bungle, Cambiata revel in the jarring transition, as in “Frankenstein,” where four bursts of screaming and disjointed instruments start and stop with impressive precision. This band is tight as hell. And when those four bursts return later in the song, the silences in between are filled with flourishes like a voice mocking, “You go right to your room, mister.” They embrace and reject song structure, forcing you to listen for the chorus, for the song’s heart, as they switch time signatures and keys with wild abandon.

Just try to get Moulton to stick with one delivery. He does screamo just fine, and often, but he also mixes in a knowing Brit-pop, a breathy earnestness, soulful R&B crooning, and cynical talking. The jazzy drum and some delicate Wurlitzer from Morin on “Shards of Pornography” introduce Moulton as lounge singer, and the lyrics suggest a self-questioning that fuels the experimentation and the passion: “I met a girl today who said she likes to cut her legs, but said I shouldn’t worry / But I do/ Her ambiguity is cruel / But I guess I’m okay … Why do I seem to rub everyone the wrong way / And fail to make myself clear?” That’s followed by a progressed chorus that leads him to offer, “I am on the threshold of offing myself / for the pain that I seem to cause everyone else.” Easy like Sunday morning, the band show their chops with “Whoah-oh” backing vocals and an ability to play soul with a smirk, before finally cycling up into a full-on rock tune, Moulton’s vocals turning from croon to chaos.

The Cambiata. Photo by Richard Fortin.

The Cambiata. Photo by Richard Fortin.

And that’s not even the best transition here. “Birth” opens with that breathy delivery over some light guitars, like Elliot Smith, but the end of the verse sees Moulton holding on to “fine” while he arcs up in the register and the band charge in like a herd of elephants. Later, a twist on this construction finds picked out guitars, contrapuntal, bouncing from one channel to the other, while the drums take a bit of a solo, using some cowbell, before the band again charge back in as a whole. The dueling structures echo the mixed emotions of the chorus: “Send my lovechild to the Golden Gate Bridge / You’ll feed her with your likeness like her father couldn’t.”

The anticipation of what might come next is alive on this album even in a third listen.

Is it true that I’d love to hear these guys in traditional alt-rock mode, pushing through wonderfully melodic verse-chorus-verse numbers behind Moulton’s powerhouse vocals (or even simply more songs like the relaxed jazz number hidden at the end of the record)? Absolutely. That doesn’t seem to be Cambiata’s bag, though. It’s clearly important that each song do something unexpected, that there should be a five-listen investment before you could hope to sing along. I’m fine with that.

This is a challenging record that makes me think about what makes a song a song and gets me actively recalling music from disparate parts of my collection, but I wonder if Cambiata realize that they can separate themselves plenty just with their musicianship, with their talent, with a few very finely turned phrases. Are they being different just for the sake of being different, thereby missing the chance to be different simply by standing out? That’s the question to which I hope they know the answer.