#spygenius

Before we get started, Windy (seen/heard here) is from Spygenius’ previous and wonderful LP, Man On The Sea, reviewed here. If you haven’t had a chance to pick that one up yet, now is the perfect time! Bundle it up with the equally great, Spygenius Blow Their Covers LP (due out in just 2 days - what this review is all about) and you will have the perfect gift for yourself or that hard-to-buy-for music lover on your list.  Christmas is coming fast and Spygenius is the perfect gift.  Do I sound a bit overzealous here?  That’s possible. I don’t get excited about music as often as I used to. But I do recognize talent and ingenuity when it hits my ears!  

Spygenius is Canterbury England’s four piece that can rock as hard as you might want to rock, while maintaining beautiful melodies and harmonies. While the band is great with composition as well, this offering is all about the composition of others. Blow Their Covers is, as you might surmise, a covers LP. 

If you think that you’ve heard covers LP’s before and that this will be the same reworked top 40 hits of yesteryear, think again. Spygenius is as careful with their music selection as they are with their own performances. They have made this music (both old and new) their very own, and because the selections are often more obscure, you may not recognize some of them as covers at all.

So what are you in for if you decide to take the plunge and pick this up?  Well let’s take a look, step-by-step. The LP opens with the two-part track Paper Sun/Love Is Only Sleeping. Paper Sun was penned by Jim Capaldi and Steve Winwood (Traffic), while Love Is Only Sleeping was recorded by The Monkeys and written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The tracks work together seamlessly and make for a nice up-beat start to the covers collection. Your toe will barely have time to stop tapping, however, because next up is So You Say You Lost Your Baby written by Gene Clark and released originally back in 1967. Leaning more mid-tempo, Therapy, by Big Stir Records label mates Plasticsoul first showed up in 2017. Even though we are jumping several decades here, there is no jarring juxtaposition. There’s a common theme: It fits beautifully. As if to prove that everything fits, we’re back to 1963′s Come On Home, written by Tom Springfield (The Springfields). Griselda brings forth the Celtic folk of Michael Hurley And The Unholy Modal Rounders, but it still fits. The most recognizable song in this collection (for me), Is That Love, (Squeeze), by Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, circa 1981, still manages to fit perfectly in this collection. That’s only the first seven tracks of the thirteen carefully curated gems here. Each fits in Spygenius’ unique style, where tight harmonies and melodies are king. I could go on, but you would get tired of me repeating the same common themes! 

One thing that stands out on this, and all Spygenius projects, is the practice of good mixing and engineering. One of Vodka’s big annoyances is the use of over amplifying the mix. When this happens (and believe me, it happens a lot!) dynamics in the music are lost. There’s no way to tweak your equipment if the wave form is a flat line at the top. Spygenius seems to know and apply this to their recordings. There is always some dynamic head room available. In today’s environment, where everyone wants to be their own engineer, or worse, hire someone with “engineer” in their title that knows only how to push everything to the top most part of the wave form, the approach of Spygenius to preserve music dynamics is particularly refreshing. 

You can find more information on Spygenius by heading up to their website. Pick up their music, including Spygenius Blow Their Covers and Man On The Sea, from Big Stir Records store, or from Big Stir’s bandcamp.com site.  

With Christmas fast approaching, pick up a gift for yourself and every music lover on your list, by picking up a copy of Blow Their Covers now!

Note: It looked like we were heading for clear skies with Covid 19. The variants are making a comeback, which means that the livelihoods of artists like Spygenius and many others are still threatened. If your situation allows it, consider purchasing more in these tough times. Please, if you are physically able to do so, get the vaccine! –Vodka

Spygenius are,... well..., genius!..., at least as far as song-craft is concerned.  Their latest long-player Man On The Sea, out now on Big Stir Records, is absolutely one of the best long-players I’ve heard this year. Enter Café Emery Hill (seen / heard here). The playful animation in this video is a perfect  match to the lyrics, melody and spot-on harmonies. It’s just a hint at what awaits you as just one of 17 tracks on Man On The Sea. As the title of the long-player suggests, nearly every track here has a nautical reference of some kind, but don’t expect them to all sound the same, because they don’t, and they shouldn’t. That would be boring!  Nope, there is plenty of tempo and stylistic changes to go along with the up-tempo numbers, which tend towards the more 80′s-rock-meets-modern-indie-pop vein. 

With one exception, Man On The Sea’s songwriting is handled by Peter Watts (lead guitar), who explains that every Spygenius long-player contains older and newer songs, often picked to match an overarching theme. The result for Watts is:

“I’ve actually found this quite fruitful artistically, because it creates a sort of de facto conversation between my older and younger selves, which is existentially revealing.”

He admits that the listener probably won’t pick up on this but he hopes that the underlying feeling comes through, and I have to say that I think it does. 

While Watts leads the show here, there is no denying the influence of the other band members. These include Ruth Rogers (bass / vocals), who penned and sings Spite, the only song on the long-player not written by Watts, Matt Byrne (keyboards / vocals), and Alan Cannings (drums / vocals). From the four comes a magnificent, massive sound, full of instrumental interplay and tight harmonies.

It would be a daunting and a near impossible task, to take on describing or reviewing each of the 17 tracks, here. The sheer volume alone of the 73 plus minutes of music is a lot to take in. That said, if you’re thinking that the band has created a double-length LP with a bunch of filler, you would be wrong!  Each track is a masterpiece on its own. 

While I won’t review every track, I do have a few favorites that I have to say something about, not least of which is the video track, Café Emery Hill. This bubbly single succeeds at being a safe fantasy to take your brain to. With viruses and governmental shenanigans, we all need to escape, and where better to head to than a fantasy café on the shore of a fantasy sea filled with music? The lushly beautiful mid-tempo Albion could be a reflection on the political realities (disappointments?) in both the US and the UK. Live for the present is the message behind Tommorowland, another slower paced number, which flies in the face of the common orthodoxy: Work for the future you will have tomorrow. Green Eyed Monster, one of two epic length tracks, clocking in at nearly 7 minutes, provides a single bending note of atonal distortion that runs beginning to end, which, coupled with the melody of the song and vocal harmonies, provides an eerie soundscape that fully lays out the imagery for the listener. Perhaps one of my all-time favorites here is Midnight Bandola, mostly for the song structure, plodding beat, and the fact that you want to sing along. It’s a track that I can’t get out of my head. It’s a song that Watts refers to as “a song of human reconciliation and bonding.”

You can find more information on Spygenius by heading up to the band’s web site, which has everything you might need. For purchase of Man On The Sea, I recommend heading up to Big Stir Records, where you can pick up the long-player in either vinyl or CD format, each of which includes a digital download with purchase. You can pick up the band’s back catalog from their web site store, with a few options available on their bandcamp.com site. 

Man On The Sea is a boat-load of music, mini-masterpieces each one, that can stand alone without the support of the other tracks. The band is tight, comfortable in the groove that they have created for themselves over many years of performing and recording. If you only have the budget for one album this year, I’d make it this one! Go do it now!

 My name is Tom but that is what the house matron called me so it is no big thing, except that it is my name (and that of many another, such as Jones, Petty, Selleck, O’Connor and Of Finland) and I would like to say I was asked not to write the notes for ‘Pacéphale.

Now Tom O’Gormliss used to be the Spygenius presager and then, in the Charnock Richard Services he became the Spygenius former presager (them having driven off without him, to be fair I was having trouble with the locking on the toilet’s door) and now Tom O’Gormliss is the presager of Spygenius again so when he – and I’m using the third person here for my rhetorical effects – was asked not to write the notes for ‘Pacéphale he’d already spent three days writing a 30,000 word blog post about it, except it all disappeared when I spilled my – I mean he spilled his Complan in the laptop, him, that’s me, the bloke what did it.

So here and now, unsoiled, unverified, under-cooked, uncomprehensible, impure and favourably-immeasurable is a review of ‘Pacéphale by Evans Evanteen, a bloke I first met in Job Club and who has frightened me a few times with his behaviour but I owe him money, so there we are: 

If there is still any doubt that rock and roll is an old man’s game (as observed by Schubert Schubert in the sleeve notes to You Are The Stillness, his 1974 masterpiece on the Harvest label), then next Friday – with the revelation of the new Spygenius LP – should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice, aesthetic bigotry and philistine bias, artistic chauvinism and middle-class jaundice, Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames, Ray Allen and Lord Charles, swept away in a deluge of joyborn muse’s making, which only Gavin (from Mill Hill) will not hear and only Trisha and possibly Pat (used to live in Fulham, think they’ve moved now) will not acknowledge.

Called simply ‘Pacéphale (‘Percy’s Fall’) it’s not wrapped in a plain white cover adorned only by the song titles and those four faces, faces which for some still represent the menace of variously-haired middle-age, for others the great hope of a headless horseman bearing a whip fashioned from a human spine, and for others the desperate, apparently endless struggle against desperate, apparently endless struggle (resolved by the satori state embodied in the mantra Get Over Yourself, which pictures a soul’s progress blocked by a wall of which it is itself composed, and from which a secular Humpty Dumpty rehearses a never-ending cycle of death, rebirth and suffering, to be released after eternity’s end by a solitary cuckoo’s hoot and the symbolic unwrapping of a Kinder Surprise egg at sunset).

In Spygenius’s eyes, as in their spectacles, you can see a certain amount of froth on the daydream, beyond which we glimpse the capering form of our old fiend Shock-Haired Pete, his nasty nails newly trimmed so as to effectuate the more proficient titillation of his gee-tar strings.  He is attended by two kindly giants, Sir Adrian Huge and Sir Adrian Stout, who both interpret and make demands of him, and punish him by locking him inside a vast replica of HG Wells, forcing him to confront the wet, dark eugenicist inside the avuncular social reformer.  

And a third there is who walks beside him, for she is everywhere.

‘Pacéphale, decapitant, ever-hopeful, his palm leaf basket stuffed with redundant dreams;  Satchmo, his horn adorned with friendly stars, a copy of Ibsen stuffed down his mini-moog; Ubu, leaf-nosed, be-crowned, two left feet, two right feet, singing the Nobodaddy blues on a mandolin finished in finest kingfisher beak; Conundrie, everything, everybody, nothing, nobody.

It's not as if Spygenius ever seek such adulation. When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. When three or more meet, it’s a pain in the arse frankly.  The extraordinary quality of the 13 new songs is one of simple istigkeit.  If a speeding car on a day of sunlit clouds can conjure the ineffable isness of awareness, so too can a whip-tight backbeat festooned with happysad human harmonies whizz a pilgrim through the woods of illusion to the rolling river of Ding an sich by sheer force of existential momentum, as is proved throughout ‘Pacéphale both algebraically and organically at the Level of Intrinsic Groove.

The skill at orchestration has mutated with infinite misprision. Full orchestra, brass, solo violin, glockenspiel, saxophone, organ, ‘Pataphysical mirror, Satchmo’s horn, the King’s mandolin, some cats, the lost Grail, Satchmo’s mini-moog, harpsichord, all manner of sea creature, are used sparingly and thus with deftness.

References to or quotations from Bosse-de-Nage, Boris Vian, Julia Kristeva, Fred Gwynne, Gordon Tracy, Mr Knatchbull Twee, Dr Asif Aziz, Embraceable Zombie Hegel, and Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight are decanted into an aural tincture that has become the Pazyryk Carpet of post-post-modern musics.  It’s all there, even if you don’t listen. 

At the core of ‘Pacéphale we find You and Me and Jiminy C, which accompanies Act 8 of the psychodrama, and which is designed by robot grasshopper. The aim is to effect within just three minutes a reprogramming of the listener’s brain comparable to several years of intensive CBT. 

Components include: pre-hypnotic suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, psychedelic backwash, infant memory shadows, those stills of Emily’s shop at the start of Bagpuss, our first glimpse of sepia, our first hint of lost time, the nostalgia of the newborn for the womb, Professor Stanley Unwin speaking in tongues his alien visions to unfurl, a camera that pulls out through a doll’s house window to reveal we’re inside a larger doll’s house, The Fairy with Turquoise Hair, a transcendental signifier in the shape of a large ornate goblet, always becoming never being, sound effects, overheard gossip, backwards-tapes, janglings from the subconscious memories of a floundering civilisation, unmistakable clarity and foot-tapping beauty.

At the end, as at the beginning, all you do is glow and vibrate.  Whatever your taste in Engelbert Humperdinck, then Spygenius have done it better.

This record took them five lustra to make and if you think that's slow going, consider that since its completion they've travelled another 15 light years. Not even Schubert Schubert wrote at that altitude. 

Buy the new Spygenius LP here - cleans you, thrills you, may even stop you from getting drafted

All LP artwork reproduced by sexy permission of the artist.  Click here to see the video for the Spygenius romanto-deconstructo classic Autoclave - it’s cool, aye.