Quick Before it Melts

Wednesday 16 December 2009

The real feel

I need to relax.  I’m the kind of person who craves a certain level of control and consistency in my life, and when little things get thrown out of whack, or even minor plans have to shift mid-stream, it can cause me no end of distress.  Major issues on the job?  Not a problem.  Medical emergencies of the highest priority?  All in good time.  Miss a blog post deadline, though, and I’ll obsess about it for days.

That’s why I’m sitting here with the pressure of a deadline breathing down my neck making sure that there’ll be something here for you to read today.  That something is my take on The Real Feel, the latest album by Spiral Stairs, aka Scott Kannberg, one-time Pavement guitarist, formerly (or maybe currently still?) the man behind Preston School of Industry.  This is the first time Kannberg’s recorded as a solo artist, and while it’s not reaching Slanted and Enchanted levels of brilliance, it’s a competent album of Neil Young-influenced rugged rock and roll. I was never a dedicated Pavement fan, but I certainly appreciated their contribution to the evolution of independent music in North America, and have been nothing if not reverential to the band’s legacy and the place of Kannberg and his former partner Stephen Malkmus in the canon of modern rock.

I don’t know why, but I always thought of Pavement, and as an extension both Malkmus’ and Kannberg’s projects, as being of a loose and ramshackle quality that ran in contradiction to my more orderly and organized way of looking at the world.  That’s most likely the reason I stayed away from their work for so long, but as I’ve started to loosen up some (and it is a work in progress, I admit) I’ve been getting into Preston School of Industry albums more and really taking a listen to what Kannberg’s all about.  The Real Feel is an aptly titled work, because it truly has the feel of a sincerely written and performed piece of work.  It’s real, and it feels real.  So what if I wasn’t planning on writing about the album right now at this very moment?  What else could I have possibly come up with to say about it if I had waited any longer?  Sure, Pavement’s coming up to their first live performances in ages, but that’s not going to be relevant to this record.  Sometimes, an album is just an album, and you have to take it for face value, relax a little, and let it do it’s thing.  Is this post a rambling mess of garbled thoughts and random diversions?  Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s not one I’d be in my best-of collection.  Do I give a shit?  Yeah, I do, but I’m going to hit the “publish” button anyway and be done with it.  Sometimes, you just need to be real, right?

MP3: Spiral Stairs “True Love”
MP3: Spiral Stairs “Maltese T”
Myspace: Spiral Stairs

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by J. Di Gioia | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under MP3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.