Alexander Spence - Oar
To explain this album’s wild incoherence and striking directness, the assembled personages generally take up the skip-spence-moby-grape-went-crazy-fire-axe-hotel-door-motorcycle narrative. Who needed to commit to tape before being himself committed to life beyond the fringe, exhaling his final gasp of accumulated genius, and his friends let him do exactly what he wanted to, their love mixed with fear. As much as that narrative may tempt us, however, in whatever context, from Syd Barrett to Daniel Johnston, it fails to tell us what mysterious possibility makes a few mad ramblings so fruitful, while there are plenty more fools out there just dusting the wind.
I want to think rather that a certain clear and strong frame of mind prefers not to polish every speck of ruin away from a piece of once-perfect marble dug up. At bottom we love the noise because we’re sick of dredging ourselves, and no amount of new spotty garbage layered upon crafted perfection can recreate the burnt carcass of original sin.
Insanity is sometimes just a cover for genius left untampered, and too bad if it is then relied on for forming expectations. We let these people have one unmixed drink from the well, and then write their names on a list. It’s a better fate than quietly suffocating under the scrutinizing temperance of people who mean well. Listening to Barrett’s official post-Floyd albums is like watching a man three nights into his last week in hell, as the nightly news dresses him up for an interview. Opel, on the other hand, shows Barrett as he ponders down into himself.
Or is it Skip the madman… He terrifies his friends even without an axe, and Wal-Marted strangers are dead on with their screwed-sideways stares. Craft is easy to love precisely because it reconfirms a comfortable position in society, it provides a place to hang our expectations while we visit someone’s inner life. He has a coat rack, so how dangerous can he be?
Here on Oar, I think the songs, which can dredge the hippie marsh a bit too thickly at times, could be just another bit of music without the haywire performances. It’s the stumbling wince of the guitars and drums at war, combined with the weight of Spence’s singing, with its 2 AM train station opposite-bench staredown.
This is where the beauty of composed music really sits. In the interval between when the idea is formed and when it is executed, a dozen different impressions apply to the same work, all of which at once strike the listener’s own bundled frames of reference. The actual work is a collection of mutually reflecting possible works.
For example, the mixed-up meters of “Diana” create tension and failure that the song itself seems to try to avoid. It’s as though in a moment of lucidity Spence polished away the songwriting’s dirty beginnings, but when it came time to record, that lucidity had passed. The song has a sort of swollen instrumental tag that should release just before the chorus comes back again, but in practice it just retreats. You can hear what he imagined and expected, but also what he ended up with, which is going to sound like a ridiculous failure to almost any pair of ears. Ridiculous failure which still comes around for one more stab at that guitar lick.
1 year ago
