If there exists a group able to make music as sour-sounding as Tarwater, I'd like to hear it. On second thought, maybe I wouldn't. Spider Smile, Berliners Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok's eighth album under the moniker and second for hometown imprint Morr Music, marks a decade of the duo finding ways to further tweak their long-tweaked formula of blending electronic textures and a variety of oft-exotic instrumentation, with all manner of astringent sonics located in the crowded overlap.
Spider shows Jestram and Lippok's continued ability to implement a wide array of noisemakers-- many seeming electronic simulations of real instruments-- into their acidic mélange. Opener "Shirley Temple" showcases a nauseated synthesized harpsichord, "Sweet Home Under White Clouds" features the ethereal whine of what sounds like a musical saw, and the soft honk of an oboe colors "Roderick Usher". The album's best moment, the instrumental "Witch Park", is a clanky contraption of welded-together scraps; farting synth notes, a slowly dying harmonica and a tabla form a thrumming neo-Krautrock engine held together by a droning electronic wheeze. Even the more traditional utensils, like the pair's omnipresent acoustic guitars, are tapped and twisted to elicit their peculiarities: on "The World of Things to Touch", the sound of fingers sliding up and down metal strings is spotlighted, to unnerving effect.
The most evocative elements in the pair's instantly recognizable admixture, however, are still the lyrics and vocal delivery. In a pallid timbre evoking a warmer version of Kraftwerk's on The Man Machine, Lippok continues to provide emotionally distant-- and, to a large degree, distancing-- comment, often in stark contrast to the comparatively vivid backdrops. Spider's cover image shows an in-ground pool and umbrella in otherwise colorless surroundings, and its lyrics follow suit. These items encompass, in a manner seemingly known only to these two diffident Germans, various aspects of American society, mostly of the high variety, decontextualized and abstracted. Edgar Allan Poe's vision of decadent isolation is the inspiration for the plaintive instrumental "Usher", while the above-mentioned instrumental "Shirley Temple" couples with the elegant "When Love was the Law in Los Angeles" to construct a trans-Atlantic Hollywood pastiche. "Los Angeles" is particularly memorable for being the most upbeat track on the record-- the acoustic pluck and click and light organ flourish sound almost nostalgic for the Golden Age, especially when paired with the lyric "the boy in the cage set the world on fire."
As Jestram and Lippok's abstractions become more topical, they simultaneously become less meaningful. The new-age-leaning "A Marriage in Belmont" takes a musty view of American popular entertainment as endorsed voyeurism ("Darling, there are you and I, making love in a glass box" and "We found ourselves alone and voiceless in the fire"). Similarly, "Easy Sermon" takes the simple path toward comment on organized religion, doing its own proselytizing along the way: "A message will come to the deaf and the dumb, in an easygoing way." The slippage between icy observations and straight sermonizing is an easy indulgence, but it's the sort of tartness that Tarwater would do well to avoid altogether.
