Disaster, or near disaster, can bring life into focus quicker than just about anything. Remember back to the first time you wiped out on your bike as a kid. Right afterward, wasn't there a heightened sense of reality? As if you were asleep right up to the moment when you flipped over your handlebars? You might have been bruised and bleeding, but after the crying was over, didn't you feel more alive than ever?
This frozen moment of awareness is something Spokane managed to extend and harness long enough to create an album's worth of songs. Midway through recording Able Bodies, the Richmond-based trio's fourth album, the members of Spokane were involved in a car accident in which they flipped over twice. They were lucky to walk away without serious injury, but the accident obviously informed the remainder of the sessions. It's hard not to attribute the increased urgency displayed here over previous work to their close call behind the wheel.
Able Bodies is brief by most standards-- just under 32 minutes-- but says all it needs to say and still manages to carry you off into a wispy, airy world with chiming guitar, haunting violin, and minimal drum brush strokes. Led by Rick Alverson, formerly the helmsman of the much-lauded Virginia folk group Drunk, Spokane create evocative miniatures with just the bare essentials and a few well-placed embellishments: microcosm with a little cello here, a touch of glockenspiel there, but not enough that you could ever accuse Spokane's music of being baroque.
Likewise, Alverson's lyrics simply point the direction rather than take you by the hand and walk you home. He offers one or two concrete details, artifacts and objects, and that's about it. It's as if he knows how little time is given him and his fragile crew, so he tries to say more with less. And the beauty is that it's always enough to get you somewhere-- through the song at the very least-- and usually somewhere you weren't expecting to be taken by the scant nature of the raw materials. "I set my thin trunk of ribs in a room/ My full set of teeth by a horsehair broom," he sings on the album closer "The Made Bed," revealing a world to those with the patience to listen. Elsewhere, his lyrics resemble the kind of fragmented thought you might have while pulling yourself from a twisted heap of metal that was once an automobile: fragmented, yes, but keenly aware of detail and with a heightened sense of the real. "In houses/ I'm waiting/ The future seems misshapen/ The ease of wishing is a weight I know/ And victory is so hard to let go," he sings on "In House." Literally, it makes little sense, but through the delivery and the music it speaks volumes.
Comparisons with Duluth dirge-rock standard bearers Low are perhaps inevitable when discussing a band like Spokane, but while Low evoke images of snow-covered wastes and Midwestern desolation, Spokane have a distant, 'Old America' quality to their sound, mainly due to the copious and haunting use of the violin. Half of the time it sounds like it could accompany a Ken Burns Civil War documentary on Virginia battlefields. And like those documentaries, Able Bodies conveys an air of triumph amidst the scenes of wreckage.
