The idea of genre is a one of the several banes of a music blog existence. While they serve a clear purpose, and we lean on them as a castaway would to their raft, the simple words trigger the beginning of a game difficult to ignore. How many punk boxes does this submission tick? How does this singer-songwriter compare to Molina and Mitchell and Morrissey? In the end, we’re not listening to the song so much as assessing it against the group to which it claims to belong. Even some of the acts who try to defy genre end up becoming a weird slave to it, their conscious act of avoidance becoming a weird inter-genre-/genreless-genre of itself.
The music of Spartan Jet-Plex, the songwriting project of Nancy Kells, is not so much between genres but rather apart from the discussion entirely, made with the sole aim of communicating ideas or feelings or messages in the most interesting and effective way possible. The result is a curious liberation for us, the audience; a freedom from preconceptions or listening rules, an abandonment of the constant search for recognisable patterns and obvious influences. As such, we’re able to listen as if for the first time. Instead of asking if a song is folk or pop or punk, we’re listening to the layers of instrumentation and the feelings they invoke. Rather than judging if a song is happy or sad or somewhere in between, we let the current take us, prepared for it to be both and neither and back again, all within the same track.
Kells’s latest album, Get Some, feels like a real progression, taking coordinates from the stranger parts of Touch Tone and setting sail into the fog. ‘Uncaused’ opens like the soundtrack to some long lost 16-bit videogame, at once intimate and otherworldly, leaving it to the second track to envelop us fully in the thick and dreamy blanket that constitutes this current iteration of Spartan Jet-Plex. ‘Clear Section’ is slow and heartfelt, the background synths snaking like fingers of dry ice around the simple electronic beat and Kells’s vocals, words which echo as though through a barren space or else reverberating within the speaker’s head. This is followed ‘Emptiness’, a suitably mournful, detached song with a creepy sci-fi quiver behind everything.
“I speak to you
and no one’s there, ah
I’m soundless
regardless
of my mess, ohand all that’s heard
is skin and flesh
I am nothing
emptiness”
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‘Thin Transparent’ is a lush dream pop song that skips along with a sweetly somnolent groove, morphing around the halfway mark with a spoken sample and the introduction of electronic noises that dance and flicker like tongues of blue flame or St Elmo’s fire. Like a lot of the album, the song has a slightly surreal, kaleidoscopic feeling, never quite settling in one place and feeling all the more focused for it. ‘Lifeline’ is deceptively desperate, the syrupy instrumentation and smooth vocals hiding a plea for help and release, while ‘Life is Mine’ feels like a hymn born of the Twin Peaks universe. However, rather than having the sinister oddball vibe that’s usually associated with Coop and Co., this is cut from the floaty, elegiac material that wafts just out of shot, the gossamer thin membrane that separates Lynch’s reality from a land of dreams.
‘Wonder’ is layered and lonely, a late night lament where both loss and hope hold their own terror. “The stars come out at night / and I am known,” sings Kells, “you hold the key for trust / and these prayers are shown / to be the rest of me / and these prayers are known”. ‘Implode’ follows with a claustrophobic twist, and again there is a duality to the fear – the dread of being found and the terror of remaining hidden. The obscure unease that threads through the record grows ever more palpable, though just as you begin to get a handle on it Kells tunes out with closer ‘Prism Prayer’, a synth-heavy dematerialization that fades into wordless choruses and that constant, sorrowful drone.
Taken at face value, Get Some is an indistinct album, the themes and meanings wrapped in layers of abstract lyrics and varied instrumentation. However, this vagueness itself curls and contorts and creeps into your head, eluding inclinations to describe and detail and thus bypassing the whole processing machinery most music must enter. As such, Kells’s thoughts and feelings arrive whole, unaltered, meaning that you feel what’s being said, even if it’s impossible to put into words.
Get Some is out now and you can grab your copy from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, including a lovely cassette edition.
Cover art by Nancy Kells, photographed by Julyanna McNamara