Growing up, I owned a single music poster. It was some goofy one of the Alarm, in which they stood beside a flag, wearing mousse and trying to look serious. The poster wasn't very big, but it stood apart from all the other posters in my bedroom because there were no dismembered heads, rotting flesh or disembowled bikers hanging out with these fine-haired Canadians. You see, I was a kid raised on Fangoria, and my idol was Tom Savini, the special effects maestro who had his intestines ripped out (on screen, that is) in Dawn of the Dead. One of the things that makes Santa Sprees so special to me is that they shared my same dream. Their song on 1999's Head in the Clouds compilation, "I Wish I'd Been An Extra in Dawn of the Dead", was not only cool and kooky but rang very true to me.
Enter their first album, Keep Still, on which the Santa Sprees continue to amaze and impress. While they stake no claim here to other dreams I've had, each of these 24 lo-fi pop delights shows Tokyo exiles Anthony Dolphin and Katherine Marshall to be Bob Pollard with a little bit of twee and a lot of originality. "Alcholic Gunslingers Are Cool" boasts a simple but wonderful keyboard line, and harmony vocals that add a sense of longing and dreaminess to the track. You get the impression that they're singing in front of a poster of John Wayne, and getting teary-eyed. Other highlights, like "Our Charity Pt 1", come off like some delirious carnival trip, but benefit again from Dolphin's vocals, which always have a way of keeping the craziness from being just a one-time-listening thrill. His voice, which sometimes breaks and sometimes just squeaks, is never a deficit. Instead, it has a way of giving extra dimensions to the group's work, bringing added levels of drama to tracks like "Back There".
Comparisons with Guided By Voices are all over the place -- 24 wonderfully titled songs, all of them short, some of them more like great fragments than fully-fledged songs -- but Santa Sprees have a far more cinematic quality to their material, as if they did homework for the album by watching Fellini's documentary, Clowns, with the soundtrack blasting. There are so many strange instruments played here, not to mention a wealth of strange sounds that I wouldn't have believed a keyboard, guitar or harmonica could project. Not only a potential Bible for future bedroom popsters, Keep Still is simply great fun.
|
