Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Artist: Spiral
Label: Self-released
Release date: July 4, 2013
Runtime: 57:43
Rating: 2/5
A disgustingly fat pig stares across the table at a roast piglet with an apple in its mouth and thinks, ‘that’s just how it goes, old buddy, once you end up on the wrong side of freshly rewritten history.’ That’s more or less how you could sum up a typically Slovenian pathology that has been choking the social pulse of the ‘Valley of St. Florian’ for roughly the last seventy years, along with the (artificially constructed) clash between the so-called lefts and rights, where it doesn’t matter what color the pig is, only how well it can lie and steal. And that’s roughly what the grotesque cover art and the title of the latest album by the American psychedelic/space rock/post-rock duo Spiral look like too, a duo made up of Chris Boat (keyboards, bass guitar, vocals) and Aaron Frale (guitar, vocals).
Their debut, »Death Of Billy Jensen«, came out in 2010. Since then the two have put out seven albums as Spiral, working with a revolving cast of guest musicians and releasing everything themselves, which is the peak of excessive studio hyperproduction. »A Parasite’s Guide to Rewriting History«, made up of two sprawling, mostly instrumental suites, is the eighth outing from this deeply obscure duo from New Mexico, where you can feel, among other things, the psychedelic and avant-garde influence of some prog legends like Tangerine Dream, Can and, a bit less, Pink Floyd. There are also quite a few post-rock elements to be heard along the way, with long instrumental stretches built on repetitive rhythmic motifs often taking over, interrupted at the right moments, though very rarely, by shorter, subtle arrangements on guitar and keyboards.
Avant-garde moments with noise and rhythmic polyphony are hardly in short supply on the album either, which means the rare melodic moments sound almost like foreign bodies. Boat and Frale are definitely making music for an ‘acquired taste’, meaning the sonic content of »A Parasite’s Guide to Rewriting History« is aimed at a very narrow circle of experimental music listeners, led by devotees of psychedelia, avant-garde, post-rock and some modern offshoot of space rock, and even most of them would have to be in a special mental state to stay awake through the first half hour of the album.
It all kicks off with the title track, a full half hour long, which, especially in the first half, sounds like an ambient, nightmarish dive into the heart of a bad dream, since the thoroughly dark and depressing atmosphere hardly lets up and in fact lasts through almost the entire album. There are no guitar solos anywhere, which the duo reportedly decided on in order to focus more on building tension. Distorted guitar passages cutting through the at times rather annoying repetitive rhythms are not in short supply, while the ambient synth curtains in the background are more decoration than anything else. Even though the two have a decent handle on their instruments, meaning bass, keyboards and guitar, the individual motifs sound pretty empty and sterile, so most listeners will be left emotionally cold. The depressing mood and the repetition get an occasional lift from Boat’s vocal ranting, which you could hardly call singing in the true sense of the word, while around the halfway mark there’s a shift into a somewhat more refined ambient section dominated by acoustic guitar chords. The politically incorrect messages are very hard to make out through Boat’s grimacing, even though it’s supposedly a social satire on the political abuse of history.
The second (almost) half-hour track on the album, »Artiffacts of Different Possibility«, was reportedly written back when the duo was still called Snail, which makes it Boat and Frale’s first composition of epic length, one they’ve since upgraded and re-recorded. The synth sound is beefed up with organ this time around, while hopelessly repetitive moments with overly distorted guitars are interrupted by vocal snarling and the occasional really unpleasant noise, the kind you usually hear when somebody’s TV breaks down. The whole ambient pulse of this creation could be described as the most boring, tedious and annoying thing only your worst enemy could dream up while writing music. And that’s precisely the main problem with the whole of »A Parasite’s Guide to Rewriting History«. Experimental music for an ‘acquired taste’, largely built on rhythmic polyphony or even cacophony, needs some ambient stamp and a deeper message to come off as at least somewhat relevant, rather than sounding like a bad joke with no real meaning, especially when it’s stripped of all emotion and at times sounds almost programmed.
There really aren’t many reasons to want to dig into the rest of Spiral’s discography after hearing »A Parasite’s Guide to Rewriting History«, a painfully boring entry in modern space/post-rock production, unless you’re truly, truly passionate about related musical offshoots and don’t care about the cold, empty atmosphere that runs through the entire album.
Lineup
Chris Boat – keyboards, bass guitar, guitar, vocals
Aaron Frale – guitar
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Felicia Karas – violin
Production
Chris Boat and Aaron Frale
Track list
1. A Parasite’s Guide to Rewriting History (30:00)
2. Artifacts of a Different Possibility (27:43)
