Webb Chapel – Springtime
The world was pretty quiet for a while. So quiet, in fact, that the people in it started complaining, fussing, cursing their luck that they should live in such uneventful times. For most, life just seems to flow by. It’s all a large body of water. There’s little to announce one day as being any better than a bad one. There’s nobody to bang a drum for an achievement or to shed a tear for a loss.
Terrible things, tragedies, and just plain rotten days are nothing like that. Provided you have a few of them, they feel like an event. Many people seem to desire that more than the boring, quiet times of old.
Then there’s music. It’s one of the only things, even of the sole art forms, that can tell the story of a person’s life from beginning to end within the space of a few minutes. What’s more, if the musicians are any good, the myriad of emotions that accompany that person through life will be in the song.
There’s a raging tide slamming against a poor, defenceless ship that’s dreaming of safe harbours captured in Webb Chapel’s “Springtime.” The psych-rock instrumental is the appropriate background for the excellent singing. In what sounds like a modern-day Patti Smith rock recitation, the singer invents a biography for a barely identified relation, creates drama, then relief brings the character back to life and kills her again. Life is that eventful, but only when a good rock performer is singing about you.
Spill, Dance, Refine – thats not real
The great fuck-ups to the world, the truly world-class self-saboteurs, the medallists in personal annihilation are, really, artists. The subject of their art is themselves. And the goal is not as in other professions to attain fame and glory, but to see how much misery and ruin they can create. It’s just a shame that the weavers of such tales can’t go on forever.
Often, when asked how doing such things made them feel, these creative thinkers will say something on the lines of: “I felt just like I was in a movie.” Indeed, many of them will confess that they felt as if reality had blurred in those moments, that an invisible camera was shooting a close-up of them, that great, dramatic music was being played over the scene in which they were starring.
Nobody writes those kinds of movies for you unless you write them yourself. That’s what Spill, Dance, Refine did on the excellent tale of being a bad example titled “thats not real.” The band is inspired by the desert-rock tales of debauchery of Queens of the Stone Age. That in itself is not unique, but the approach is pretty attention-grabbing. The singing and the guitar riffs across the song are very good, and the chorus rushes in with a hook that is as sharp and as twisted as the thing used to hoist up Moby Dick. Spill, Dance, Refine act as if they’re in a movie, but they’re writing one in musical form, too, and giving the best lines to themselves.
