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Suddenly, Spy Island have leapt to the top of my list of bands to watch out for, and are nipping at the heels of some of my favorite adventurous, pop-driven indie rock bands. This disc is their first full-length, after an EP in 2003. It's home-recorded and lo-fi, but these are no humble little bedroom-pop ditties. Spy Island rock out, and bandleader Dale Nicholls's songs are so ambitious and jam-packed that even a 3-minute track like "The Curse" can feel epic, in a good way. Nicholls has taken his lessons from the masters. Like my beloved Sloan, Spy Island takes hard-rock riffage to a smarter and more interesting place. "Battle Clouds" is busy with psychedelic guitar leads (as are many other tracks), but they can't crowd out the song's simple, harmonious pop foundation, a trick mastered by The Flaming Lips in their Hit to Death.../...Satellite Heart era. Another smart little trick Spy Island pulls is to fade out the soaring, anthemic outro on "Daylight Fades (as Faketown Shakes)" while you're still wanting to hear more of it—a handy page from the Bob Pollard book. Also like Pollard, and like Wolf Colonel's Jason Anderson, Nicholls has mastered the seemingly contradictory art of the casual epic, making a complexly-structured song like "Acacia III" sound unlabored and off-the-cuff. Tracks like "W.O.W." and "Jupiter Missile Whistle" should appeal to fans of The Revolutionary Hydra, with the latter song reminding me of Hydra fave "William Wizard Cauliflower." Album closer "Acacia II" is a woozy anthem that alternates between Galaxie 500-style guitar directness and densely-layered sounds reminiscent of Lenola.
Nicholls's lyrics range from the sublime ("When bullets enter snow, they make little hisses / Tiny steam puffs and deep incisions") to the silly ("I'm the wizard on welfare / My dragon's in daycare / I got ravenous rats, food stamps, and velvet pants"). They're mostly fairly pleasing, though he occasionally overreaches and comes up with a clunker ("Say a prayer for the air / Pistol-whip like you just don't care"). I guess Nicholls occasionally overreaches with the music as well, but it's hard to fault him for at least reaching, you know? Granted, this disc is can be messy in spots, and the lo-fi recording quality is flapjack-flat, but that can't compress or disguise the sound of a band scratching hard at the door of flat-out greatness. If there's any justice, these guys won't be operating in obscurity, having to record on cassettes and self-release their discs, for very much longer. (mike.02.06)
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