I bet there’s a lot of bands who wish they had Spod’s Teflon coating. There’s something far stronger than irony at work here: it’s like this thick, muddy coat of humour that’s so far managed to prevent him from becoming just the local Har Mar Superstar franchise or a pointless exercise in popular culture references. The trick is sincerity. Here is a dude is having way too much of a good time to worry about anything as boring as context or criticism*.
That’s the cover to his new album Superfrenz, featuring songs called things like “Blubberponies” and “2 Tite 2 Mention”. I get the vibe from it that Spod sees the world in vector graphics and bad photoshop jobs.*Not to imply this is anything more than a funny song about cats with twinkly synths. ‘Cos it’s not.
[Spod MySpace]
[Buy Superfrenz from Valve Records]
On the other side of the coin, there’s Because of Ghosts. Look, this album is basically a no-brainer. You’re either already right into this or you don’t care. Because of Ghosts have spent their whole short career honing their lo-fi Godspeed You! Black Emperor impression, and for This Culture Of Background Noise they jetted over to Montreal to record with Godspeed’s producer, Howard Bilerman. There’s some nice cuts on this album, make no mistake; it’s just hard to love when it’s so obviously studied.
I interviewed Because of Ghosts in 2007 and broached the subject of “post-rock”. It’s one of those labels that’s extremely unpopular with those it applies to (unlike, say, “punk” or “metal”, whose exponents wear their genre like a badge of pride), and I asked them how they were comfortable enough with it to plaster it on their press releases and websites. They said they’d heard it so much they’d just embraced it, which I thought was kind of defeatist.
[Because Of Ghosts MySpace]
[Buy This Culture Of Background Noise from Feral Media]
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