Spinanes – Arches And Aisles

Sometimes you can tell a lot just from the titles. A made-up word, Eleganza, that nails the feeling perfectly; a seemingly out-of-nowhere sports-related reference, Heisman Stance; harking back to days of innocence with 72-74. None of the song names offered by Rebecca Gates (ultimately the only Spinane) are straightforward or ordinary; like her music, they seem to be fragments snatched from daydreams, places where nonlinear thought is the norm and sound floats by on waves of color that conform to the shape of the very air that surrounds you. Its a mood thing.

A good half or so of Arches And Aisles reaches those moods as well as the highest points of her previous outings, most notably the Spinanes first couple 7-inch singles, which glowed with a magic Gates has been hard-pressed to recapture ever since. This time out, shes found a different way to get there, using a few studio bells & whistles and, most significantly, various tonal backdrops fashioned by keyboards to create a canvas for the off-kilter wordstrings and guitar licks that populate her songs.

But the end result is the same: There are moments during Kid In Candy and Greetings From The Sugar Lick and Slide Your Ass and Reach V. Speed and Den Trawler when all the surroundings fall away again, leaving the real world behind, drifting and fading into that place only the beauty of music can touch.