Spacemen 3 were a neo-psychedelic band formed in Rugby in 1982. Forty years later, in nearby Birmingham, the neo-neo-psychedelic band Spincycle was formed as a two-piece and has since doubled in size. They are known to perform in front of shifting images of filtered nature. ‘Coffee table Hawkwind’ is not a disparaging description. ‘Experiences not songs’ is accurate actually.
The beginning of ‘Tuning In’ sounds like a laser beam scanning a cornfield or a close-up recording of me having a number 2 back and sides at the hairdressers. It’s followed by a snippet from a news bulletin, in which the newsreader does not modulate his positive tone despite the disparity between the statements “multiple generations of extraordinary women” and “unbearable loss and war”. The crackle of random humanity is replaced by what sounds like a fade out excerpt from an early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club album.
‘Spincycle’ starts with dialogue between two disgruntled men from, possibly, a 70s TV show about village detectives going through a mid-life crisis. Then the music begins with Meg White-like drums and distant guitar. If Crystal Stilts decided to convey the feeling of a face being bathed in summer morning light, they would not need to bother. Debut single ‘Talog’ was released earlier this year, and it should be noted at this point that Spincycle don’t do lyrics, unless you count samples as such. Yes, on ‘Talog’, which is named after a village in Carmarthenshire, the band could have paired wistful words with the dreamy shoegaze, but sometimes words…you know…anyway…
Mouth noises make a comeback in ‘Sunstone’. An earnest Northern Irish girl tells a man with a 50s BBC accent about her temper. Her enthusiastic utterings are gradually subsumed by a wash of guitar. David Attenborough isn’t renowned for being a Ride fan, but if he was, he would select ‘Reedy River’ to soundtrack the bits of footage of river life where he’s not narrating. ‘Velvety’ follows the archived chat usurped by music template, though you might wonder for the first few seconds whether the grainy recording of a reflective American man is about to make way for a Manics’ Holy Bible-like howl of existential pain. Instead, we have tinkling arpeggios, squally chords, and a feeling that actually everything’s going to be OK. The mere fact that final track ‘Voodoo’ is nine and a half minutes long means that a comparison with Godspeed You! Black Emperor seems inevitable. If the Canadian doom mongers perked up a bit, they could conjure something like ‘Voodoo’.
What is ‘stone tape theory’? It is the theory that ghosts and hauntings happen when traumatic events are imprinted on stones. Jacques Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ – the notion that cultural elements from the past ‘haunt’ the present. Mark Fisher related this to déjà vu and the uncanny, which is “bound up with a sense of repetition or ‘coming back’…(and) may be bound up with the most extreme nostalgia.” Spincycle’s Stone Tape Theory is its own trippy trip down memory lane through its use of old recordings and its pastoral-tinged neo-neo-psychedelia. As Fisher also said, recycling is all the rage these days, but with Spincycle, you won’t rage, rage against the machine – you’ll float down a reedy river, or downstream.
Stone Tape Theory is out now via Bandcamp (and at gigs)
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Review by Neil Laurenson
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