Montreal is the Chicago of the Great White North. I'm not talking about the buildings or the baseball teams or the median waistline, but the tone of their respective independent music scenes. The parallels are striking. A handful of influential labels in each town have supported artists making an effort to expand the boundaries of rock. Both have embraced recent developments in electronic music. Both have vibrant improv scenes with members teaming up in innumerable combinations to experiment. Montreal draws a bit more from film music, and Chicago makes good use of its German imports, but there are common threads, no question.
The Montreal/Chicago comparison occurred to me while listening to this album by Frankie Sparo; he's like the Canadian Califone. His songs are painfully slow, and sung in a gruff, downcast voice. They also draw upon the music traditions of the distant past (some folk and blues, even more vaudeville) and the technology of the future (there all sort of wonderfully processed sounds on My Red Scare) to offer a portrait of urban desolation and despair.
The production was the first thing that really got to me. Recorded at the now-legendary Hotel2Tango by some folks from Godspeed, Sparo surrounds his songs with some beautiful noise. To extend my earlier comparisons a bit further, the music sounds much more like a Brian Deck production than anything you might imagine from the Godspeed camp. The drums used to hold 55 gallons of oil, cymbals are bowed or left out altogether, and evocative noises of every stripe waft about in the cobwebbed rafters. The guitar ranges from the latter-day Crazy Horse snarl of "Send for Me" to the spare, lonesome 50s-style vibrato of the opening "Bastard Heart."
But there's one essential ingredient lacking from My Red Scare, and its absence is glaring: melody. Sparo goes so far in conjuring an effective mood that he forgets to craft tunes. As I said before, his song structure owes less to folk and blues and more to the bleak vaudeville so loved by Tom Waits in the 80s. But the songs are so incredibly slow and the melodies so vague that Sparo's voice, which is interesting enough at first listen, loses its power. A word combination like "feeling glamorous" is sung as "fee-ling glam-or-ous," and takes about five seconds to complete. Annoying, I'm sorry. I can handle it with a band like Low because the melodies reveal their beauty with each new syllable, but songcraft doesn't seem to be a major priority for Sparo.
There are some exceptional moments, though. The aforementioned line comes from a track called "Diminish Me New York" that I imagine Sparo is getting some good mileage out of these days. Lines like, "It's so hard to feel tall/ Everything is tall/ Magnificent New York" are hard to hear now, but somehow, wrapped as they are in the spacious junkyard production, they're moving. "The Loneliest Mademoiselle" combines Sparo's reverberating guitar with some affecting layered violin work by Jessica Moss, and it achieves its poignant aim. But these moments where Sparo transcends the limitations of his songs don't come quite often enough, and My Red Scare remains an interesting artifact that never fascinates.
