The Spinanes

Strand (Sub Pop)
by Joshua Brown

Manos, the debut LP by The Spinanes, remains one of my all-time fave raves. I’ve always thought of it as the perfect wedding album. Rebecca Gates’ incredibly clear vocals and minimal yet full guitar stylings coupled with Scott Pfouf’s galloping drums (“yes, we have no bassist”) defined “holy matrimony” in the term’s most positive sense. Their sound was one which regarded the future of “togetherness” with starry eyes and giddy optimism, living for “now” with an awareness of inevitable problems in the relationship like a colorful flowerbed’s consciousness of its coming seasonal death. Assuming that the girl I decide to settle down with shares my musical taste, I had every intention of hiring the Spinanes to play at the ceremony.

Unfortunately, Strand forces me to renege on this offer, as it is reflective of a marriage gone dry. After deciding to “get serious” and move from their place of consummation to a ramshackle industrial town where the flora visibly choke on the toxic air, the couple become Homer and Marge Simpson on a bad day. The anniversaries are counted in shades of purple under their weary eyes, like rings in an unhealthy tree trunk’s interior. Ms. Gates’ lyrics frame this story in “Winter On Ice,” when “darkness washes off all residue of desire.” Whether or not this particular winter was unavoidable is a damn good question. Another question is whether or not we want to hear an album’s worth of odes to it.