Rock

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.

Murcielago: Murcielago

Sam

Hammers of the gods

Murcielago unleash some heavy guitars

Maybe you’ve still got a decent sound system in your car, or a weighty receiver you can still dust off from time to time. If so, there’s a chance you can fully appreciate the long-awaited Murcielago record. It’s got the gravity of a mid-sized planet.

The self-titled work, caught up for a bit in the dying gasps of the label system, certainly quells any fears fans might have had that the four-piece wouldn’t be able to live up to their transcendent live shows. The resonant vibrations of every tube in every amp these guys employ is translated wonderfully, avoiding that digitized chill that can pervade metal of a certain vintage and instead settling into a loud rock that wraps you in its warm embrace just as it’s beating you about the head and neck.

Benny Grotto, down at Mad Oak Studios in Mass., and Jim Begley at the Studio have done masterful work in capturing this sort of fire and brimstone without shaving off the edges or pumping too much air into the vocals. Neil Collins (Lincolnville, Eldemur Krimm) may be draped in reverb, but it’s still possible to make out just about every lyric, and what might be a gimmick—keeping guitarist Ian Ross always in the right channel, Matthew Robbins (King Memphis) always in the left—ends up being a splendid trick for keeping them straight and helping the listener appreciate fully their artful interplay.

There’s plenty of Kyuss and ZZ Top and Judas Priest here, maybe some 6gig, but with Jack Bruce’s recent passing, it’s hard not to hear a ton of Cream, even if it’s just because there’s a bass player doing most of the singing. It’s the same raw punch, the same joy in a riff well executed. “Money” is particularly playful, with guitars and Brian Chaloux’s (Pigboat) snare firing things up, then letting Collins go a capella: “I once had recourse, for every single slight / It’s not that I need you around, it’s that I can’t keep you in my life.”

The solo late should catch attention, with Robbins throwing out slight staccato strums, supporting the Ross lead beautifully in a desperate and crushing run: “I’ve lost all reason; I’ve come undone.” And then Robbins just takes over as they swap roles. At times it’s like they’re playing tennis.

It’s also something of a treat to hear Robbins sing on “Fairlane Swain,” a seven-minute opus of stoner rock. It’s crunchy in the open, with three-note riffs dominating, and then comes Robbins with a sneering and caustic high-end delivery that’s the height of bitterness: “Heavy metal parking lot, just a dimebag of shitpot / My mom told me not to hang around with this lot.” There may even be a reference to “fat chicks” in there.

For the chorus, Robbins rides the two syllables of “fairlane” for a few measures, then let’s a guitar peal fill in for “swain” like he’s turning his back on the song entirely. Jesus, these guys have chops.

Like any good arena-rock band, though, Murcielago have a sensitive side, too. “Cheebahawk” finds Collins getting all kinds of touchy-feely at the two-minute mark—“every time you run around, I am senseless to the sound / Of the breaking of my heart… and I know you’re not my love”—making the hard charge of the guitars firing back seem like a slap in the face. And the one-minute-long “Smoke Season” is an acoustic palate-cleanser, with Collins moving over to guitar to show they could probably pull off one of those overall-wearing stringband albums if they really wanted to.

It’s clear, though, that this is exactly what they want to be doing. While these guys have been around too long for this to signal some kind of a trend, it sure is nice to hear a completely unapologetic rock band rip through some interesting material. Maybe it’ll catch on.