Spirit Spine Flashes

Last January, I bought a CD-R from Joseph Denny, aka Spirit Spine. Ten dollars and a week later I received a package with a nice hand-written note and one of the best albums I heard all year. I was struck by the fact that such an incredible album was written and recorded by a 19 year old student (!) in Indiana (!!) using GarageBand (!!!). Unlike a lot of blind acolytes (Blind Man's Colour, Our Brother the Native), Spirit Spine's debut took Panda Bear's aesthetic as a point of departure. The album wasn't the transcendent liturgy of Person Pitch, but it was an album brimming with blissed-out pop that understood the power of a strong beat and repetition. Now Spirit Spine is back with a new album, Jungle Bridges. Like his debut, Jungle Bridges trades in echoed vocals, massive beats, and ephemeral walls of synthesized noise. The album isn't as immediate as his previous effort, and it takes a few listens to unveil its charms. He trusts the strength of the songs to reveal themselves on the listener instead of packing every moment with a catchy new idea. And while that makes a first listen a bit of a gamble, it also makes the reward more worthwhile.

Denny can be a capable lyricist. "Slept Away" boasts some of the album's most stunning lines: "When you came to wake/Had to say go away/Just a few minutes more/Switch the lights, close the door." In his unadorned language, Denny creates a scene that throbs with the tension that defines avoidance. Elsewhere, though, we get a questionable ghost story ("Ghost Suspension") and some (satirical?) New Age speak ("Are our chakras aligning? Today's really riding on it.").

Despite those minor hiccups, Denny is clearly an artist who knows his way around a mix, pushing both ends to create his signature mammoth sound. The album opens properly with "Wicked Trick," a song that defines Spirit Spine's aesthetic: bubbling synths, relentless beats riding shotgun in the mix, addictive vocal lines that echo like memories. "Stone Wheels" depends entirely on the interplay between the mile-deep canyon of bass and the watery keyboards. Late in the album, we get the anthemic "India Electric," the only song that can rightfully be called the album's spiritual center. Exactly halfway through the song, everything cracks open, revealing a glowing core of warm synth tones and a booming heart of an 808 hand clap. Jungle Bridges is not a perfect album, but it is certainly an important album. With the release of the album, we are witness to the official arrival of a significant artist who has managed to digest and process an aesthetic that most are simply aping.

You can stream Jungle Bridges here before you decide to purchase the album.