The Spinto Band - Moonwink
American 6-piece The Spinto Band have been blogger / internet indie favourites for quite some time. Recording and releasing material since 1998, but mainly coming to the discerning music fan’s attention in 2006 by means of ‘Nice and Nicely Done’, and popular single ‘Oh Mandy’, this is their second full-length album, and is released on Fierce Panda.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to find anything very positive to say about this release. The key note here seems to be a kind of anaemic, fey and mannered style. The lyrics are generally drawled, often to the point of unintelligibility (see ‘The Carnival’ • possibly the most irritating track here, ‘Later On’ and ‘The Black Flag’), and sometimes also feature an over-the-top almost-falsetto (as on forthcoming single ‘Summer Grof’). If you can get beyond that, and the feeling that the words being sung aren’t deemed important enough even by the guy singing them for him to bother enunciating them properly, then you come up against the almost relentlessly upbeat, annoyingly “perky” tempo and general mood found on of each tune (see again ‘The Carnival’, plus virtually every track featured), and the frequent use of repetition to pad out a song (“yesterday •yay •yay •yay” in ‘Vivian Don’t’; nearly every rhyme • “I won’t lie” / “So goodbye” / Sympathise” etc etc etc • in ‘Summer Grof’).
Instrumentally, they run the gamut from bar-room plinky-plonk piano, as used on ‘Later On’, through saccharine strings and cheesy brass (the latter specifically found on, yes, you guessed it, ‘The Carnival’) and lots of O.T.T. lush vocal harmonising. This often gives songs a quite rock-operatic sound, particularly on the last two tracks ‘Alphabetical Order’ and ‘The Black Flag’, both of which, in places, put me a little in mind of someone like Supertramp or 10CC. The other rather more recent touchstone would be The Guillemots, with whom they share the aspiration towards a sort of quirky charm, and with whom also, arguably, they share its failure.
The track I enjoyed best was ‘Pumpkins and Paisley’, which to its credit at least has a memorable melody and perhaps also features slightly less of the musical tics that made the majority of this album such a • for me at least • grating listening experience. For the main part, however, there was little here that I feel I would want to listen to again, or indeed recommend to others.