The Reel Feel by Spiral Stairs
By JasonK • Dec 21st, 2009 • Category: Music Reviews
The Reel Feel by The Spiral Stairs
Matador Records
The best definition of this album is schizophrenic. It teeters, nearly track by track, between Radar Love and Neil Young. One track is dripping in ’70s radio-rock with bouncing bass lines, crunchy guitar-driven harmonies and slick lounge-style singing while the next is a sparse introspective folk acoustic driven song. The vocals also change to a raspy dead-on Neil Young style that fits perfectly along Young’s “Helpless.” It’s as if two different bands created a double album crammed into a single LP.
It creates, as expected, some disharmony, but it also keeps the album fresh even if a bit erratic. There is nothing fancy through here. It’s fairly straightforward with much of the instrumentation rooted solidly in the guitar rock of the 1970s and early ’80s. This isn’t by mistake. On Spiral Stair’s MySpace page it says The Reel Feel “has a vibe similar to 70′s albums by Fleetwood Mac, Captain Beefhart, and guitar god Richard Thomspon (not to mention Aussie psych-rock icons Died Pretty). This is exactly, if not ironically, correct.
However, this is not Pavement. Anyone expecting a continuation of that great band will be disappointed. This is, on its own, something completely different. Even though it says The Reel Feel is “the same rock that made Pavement the most influential band of the ’90s and the same strange, dischordant playful and melodic Spiral Stairs rock that your parents loved,” it is not. This sounds like a musician profoundly influenced during a particular era as a child and searchingly trying to recreate those sounds. To that end, it succeeds. To the end of making a singularly great indie rock album that carries on the tradition of Pavement, it fails.
However, should we expect this album (or any album by a well-known musician) to sound exactly like any previous work? No, we shouldn’t. Spiral Stairs is not Pavement, and as evidenced by The Reel Feel, it is not trying to emulate it. There needs to be room for an artist to branch out and explore regardless of our particular feelings for his previous work.
The slide guitar of a Mighty, Mighty Fall creates a lazy backroom bar feel. The lyrics float around with not-quite-in-tune harmonies that lend it a credence of believability. The extended guitar solos on tracks such as True Love hark back to a time when the guitar was the principal instrument. In an era of Vocoders, Casio beats and Pro Tools, Spiral Stairs creates an album that is first and foremost true to music, and in a sense, recreates a time when the musician—and not the producers—took center stage on a recording. When an album can have more producers than musicians, the Spiral Stairs can show us how a real album recorded by real musicians can sound. Is there enough here to set the world on fire? No. But when did we need to have a groundbreaking album to appreciate great musicians practicing their craft?
