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One Fresh Spin, One Ol d
Gem
By Marc Stephens
Fresh Spin
Artist: Solar Powered People
Album: Hibernation
Released: Nov. 5, 2007
Label: Three Ring Records
Verdict: Ride meets early INXS
It only took 11 months, but 2007 finally got a worthy shoegazer
record to call its own! Second only to grunge as modern-day
rock ’n’ roll’s most repetitive and consistently
least-innovative genre, shoegaze-style dream-pop boasts a
deservedly lame reputation as a slacker haven for noisy,
untalented acts forever mired in whatever Ride and My Bloody
Valentine were doing 15 years ago. In all seriousness, we
frustrated devotees consider ourselves lucky to corral one
decent release a year in this forlorn category — and finally,
just before year’s end, we got it.
Remember that “drive faster forever” feeling you experienced the
first time INXS’ “Don’t Change” came on the radio? That’s the
epic vein Solar Powered People have mined on this record, and
it’s pure gold. Granted, it demands a certain elegiac confidence
to forge an entire album’s worth of seamlessly phenomenal
race-car anthems, without sounding corny or overextended doing
it. But just try seizing the reins of Hibernation’s third song,
“Commercial Flight,” and discover what true feet-off-the-ground
hyperspace actually feels like! A mix of soaring guitars,
liquescent keyboards and pulsing metallic vocals,
“Flight” has a fearless, driving logic all its own, one steeped
as much in the time-tested waters of classic early-’80s new wave
as in My Bloody Valentine shoegazer pop. Beyond that, SPP also
adopts what seems to have become the hallmark trend of mature
21st-century indie rock — namely, sprinkling haunting piano and
keyboard interludes throughout the album, a tack proven to
elevate the overall thrust and impact of popular recordings
since Bach. Needless to say, it works wonders here, too.
Old Gem
Artist: Lanterna
Album:
Lanterna
Released: 1995
Label: Parasol
Verdict: Spaghetti western, indie-rock style
I have a longtime theory about Western-inflected rock music.
There’s just something in the American soul that can’t help but
respond to crimson haze-streaked sunsets, dusty sagebrush hills
or brawny horses galloping across wide, snow-covered prairies.
My favorite illustration of this primal gut reaction would have
to be the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” as timeless a
rock song as there ever was — made so by Graeme Edge’s
relentlessly insistent cowboy rhythms, which still retain their
appeal for the same reason John Ford’s films always will. Henry
Frayne’s debut album with Lanterna tracks this theme all the way
across the continent, stretching his heavenly and resourceful
guitar sounds out across 17 tracks of stark desert beauty.
As with any Lanterna record, the
biggest draw here is Frayne’s crowd-pleasing guitar licks —
haunting as a cloudy sky, piped through with endless loops of
reverberation until the echoes become a self-sustaining
instrument unto themselves. The song “Dark Spring” boasts more
rings and sonic layers than a 100-year-old redwood, while
“Passage” marries this same technique with a driving drumbeat to
truly exhilarating effect. And such might just constitute
Lanterna’s
secret weapon: Contrary to expectations, this record is far from
sleepy, with energy and aural surprises around every turn. The
experience is hardly 100 percent prairie all the way through,
either, in that the record actually mixes two early Frayne
releases so the final seven compositions tend toward a breezier
(“Achieving Oneness”) or more somber (“Puerto de Luna”) mood.
Only one or two pointless droning tracks mar what otherwise
stands as a brilliant and compelling journey of manifest destiny
on horseback and grizzled leather.
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