Spencer: Love Is Not Enough

Sam

Why you gotta be so mean?

A four-song fuck you from Spencer

Songs about love, unrequited and not, are basically the foundation of pop music. Songs about active dislike, not so much.

Sometimes one leads to the other, though. Fleetwood Mac basically rules the breakup song category, with a whole band in utter dysfunction and an entire album to prove it. And it was a lost girl that fueled Bon Iver’s trip into the woods: “And now all your love was wasted, and then who the hell was I?”

Locally, Wes Hartley and Dead End Armory got off a good breakup line or two, like this gem from “Hope You’re Good”: “It reminds me of the time you stuck a gun to my temple and made me beg for forgiveness / Aren’t I good enough to stay?” And who can forget KGFREEZE’s boast that he’s “got a better falsetto than the motherfucker you’ve been raving about”?

Thus far in Spencer Albee’s long and well-documented local career, he’s always leaned toward the Beatles’ stock in trade (all “I love you yeah, yeah, yeah” — with the possible exception of “Where You Been” off the School Spirit Mafia record, which is awfully jealous). Truly, he’s penned any number of bouncy love songs, including “So Good,” with one of the better descriptions of compatibility: “I start to sing a song I thought no one else could hear / But you knew all the words.”

But the time has now come when Love Is Not Enough, a four-song fuck you to a girl who’s done him wrong (it’s a small town, so we won’t get into particulars). The title track pretty much says it all: “You’re fucking him / You’re fucking me / Where lies the truth? / It’s in between.” Ouch.

Damn if that song ain’t catchy, though, in a dystopic kind of way. There’s nothing like personal strife for inspiring creative expression. It’s hard not to hear a little “Sector Z” from Albee’s Rustic Overtones days in the spacey keyboard lasers, and they’re balanced nicely by xylophone pings and digitized strings and growling low end. Perhaps best of all, there is that piano pounding, whether rippling single notes or big chords, that used to be such a foundation to Albee’s music, but had been recently replaced by guitars acoustic and electric.

The piano certainly drives “So Long,” the most purely pop track here and the one that reveals just how cut to the bone Albee really is: “I caught you in a corner, and like the rat you are, you tried to chew through me / If you had been more honest, just imagine how much better life would be.” It’s goofy and playful, sure, but those reverbed and doubled vocals in the chorus reflect what’s clearly a deep well of anger.

Lucky for us he’s funneled that ire into rumbling, oompa bass lines like these.

The bass line that follows the feedback open to “One2Three” is particularly tasty in opposition to a glockenspiel kind of thing: “She said, ‘Baby I’ve been sleeping / With secrets I’ve been keeping.’” It’s sedate, child-like, narcotized. The PTSD of love lost, with an “A Day in the Life” primal yell in the background for the finish and an anguished entreaty in “please remember me.”

It’s all just so different in temperament from the big happy family of Spencer and the School Spirit Mafia or the aggressive bombast of As Fast As or even the self-assured confidence of Spencer, which we were discussing not much more than a year ago. This is the sound of a kid who’s been through the wringer. Hard not to harken back to that Mafia track, “Way of the World”: “And the boys like the girls, and the girls act like they don’t / But it’s just the way of the world.”

Shit happens. And then you write a song in a weird operative voice, like “I Don’t Know,” and finish up doing a Frankie Valli thing and life goes on. Spencer’s still going to write with a poppy bounce, the bridge just might be a little more accusatory than usual: “I can’t believe a word you say / How can you treat a man this way?”

There was talk of an LP for New Year’s. It hasn’t happened yet. Will Albee continue in this vein, giving in to his darker half in a way we haven’t seen before? Let’s hope so.

Snaex: The 10,000 Things

Sam

Living with Snaex

Giving the finger to a time of moral crisis

There’s something kind of thrilling about the cover to the second Snaex record. Check it out:

On that black and white cover of The 10,000 Things, Chriss Sutherland’s and Christopher Teret’s wives give us the finger, in unison, while their toddlers sit in their laps, even nurse. Their eyes are darkened, making them menacing, but their mouths are set in something more like determination. A mix of that classic Johnny Cash shot and, well, Duccio’s “Madonna and Child.”

And it’s all a big fuck you to what? Us? Sutherland and Teret’s lingering dreams of making music for others to consume? Society at large?

How about the almighty, himself?

It’s hard not to draw that conclusion after the slow rock of “Most High,” with its crunchy electric guitars propping up a series of lyrics that paint a domestic picture of faith that’s been shaken: “There’s a meal in the oven / And there’s a baby on my knee … And nobody lives in the sky/ But I try to walk in the path of the most high.”

That’s Teret (you’ve heard him in Company), whose delivery is lower down and more precise in the enunciation than Sutherland’s, so that the song resonates right through your gut.

Sutherland, instead, has a keen that’s more piercing, mimicked in “Words” by a pinging guitar tone that etches out a sparse melody in the break. It pushes past the limiters and distorts in the headphones just as Sutherland seems to spiral through emotions: “I am something incomplete / That complains constantly / In here words make me alone / And out there I don’t matter at all.”

Of course, these guys matter as much as anyone, locally, plying as they do any manner of outsider forms and structures. Sutherland has been consistently important since Cerberus Shoal in the 1990s, and his joining with Teret makes for a folk that’s edgy and unnerving in all the right ways.

Especially with the remixing of three tunes from the debut Snaex album, Creep Down, from 2012. With the Ugly Facade adding ghosts of digitized beats and bass kicks to what began as stripped down acoustic pieces recorded live, they are given detachment, like Sutherland and Teret are just along for the ride. “Come Clean” is maybe the most distilled of these efforts, coming in at 3:33 and seemingly built for a radio station that doesn’t exist (or, rather, WMPG), full of harmony and a pulsing intensity: “It’s not their fault they need to feed their little ones.”

Further pushing your emotional buttons are a series of vignettes, samples accompanied by distant and muted piano, that stand up for the downtrodden. “At the End of the Day” is terrifically disturbing, with some CNN bobblehead using that most meaningless of clichés to introduce the fact that it’s “simply a question of whether Israel gets tired of continuing to bomb a civilian population.”

Ya know, like the whole Palestinian conflict ends with Netanyahu one day turning to Rivlin and declaring: “I’m bored. Let’s go do something else.”

And then there is Martin Luther King, Jr., agreeing with Dante in “When Silence Is Betrayal”: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” With so much commercial music today trying desperately to be morally vanilla, Snaex are more than welcome in their button-pushing.

Cutting most to the quick, though, is Sutherland’s “Daddy,” an exploration of his relationship with his father, done with a pop melody that cuts through distorted electric guitar: “It was hard, the way you left us that day.” There’s a rolling fingerstyle guitar, a reticent snare, and a naked regret.

“In me is a piece of you,” Sutherland wails, “I spring from us in the other direction / I fear us and our lost connection.”

And through it all, those babies stare out from the record’s sleeve, a reminder of the dad Sutherland has a chance to be, even if the world is full of bullshit you’d rather not have your kid muddle through. “We don’t talk about heaven,” Teret sings on the closing cover of Lucinda Williams’s “Blue,” an organ bleeding through, “we don’t talk about hell.” Instead, we live in the moment and do the best we can with what we have.