Life is tiring, and Spider Bags have always provided a party for the increasingly fatigued. Frontman Dan McGee’s words have had a whiskey-slouch to them ever since the band's 2007 debut, A Celebration of Hunger. It could spring from his North Carolina clime, but there’s a Southern gothic bent to Spider Bags that separates them from a lot of American garage fare. McGee gives a leery eye to all there is to love; he whips dry vitriol and broken-hearted balladry into roadhouse punk songs that sound like they’re barely hanging together. This is part of the fun of listening to any Spider Bags song, as they cause you to ask to yourself, “Might this whole thing crumble into a pile of dirt and rust?”
Over the years, things congealed more and more, which culminated in their most cohesive work to date, the 2012 album Shake My Head. That album was crammed with life, skipping around from shit-kicker fuzz to psych freak guitar solos while keeping the twangy energy up the whole way through. It follows that Frozen Letter is a bit of a comedown, drunk on its own sound; McGee, aged and with two kids under his roof, sounds utterly windburned by life. It’s their first record for Merge, which means Frozen Letter is easily their most hi-fi record yet—but the band takes on a more skeletal sound regardless. It was recorded in just three days, but it sounds a bit less dangerous, and a bit more inscrutable, than their past releases.
The band split Frozen Letter into two divergent sections, as the first four tracks kick-up all this dirt only to have it idly settle as the album winds on. It has the shape and feel of a sturdy ‘70s classic rock record, swirling with the Kinks' charm and the strutter of early AC/DC. The guitars, the vocals, and the lyrics are flayed and bony, more exposed than ever before, which works both for and against the band. Frozen Letter is at its best when McGee plays sweet and direct as on “Back With You Again In The World”, an ode to a love as simple as the fired-up Dixie shuffle they take up. When he taps into the morose, self-pitying spirit of Hank Williams on the ballad in the back half of the album, “Walking Bubble”, his words tumble out with ease, turning out a beautiful phrase like ”There aren't enough words in a day for a man like me” with the ease of flipping a blade of wheat grass from one side of the mouth to the other.
The record is filled with little moments that pop—the guitars that scream at the end of “We Got Problems” and their cover of Texas rocker/drifter John Wesley Coleman’s “Summer of ’79” are two big highlights—but in between are long, vexing stretches of inertia. Spider Bags used to play through the bitterness and the malaise, but on Frozen Letter it sometimes sounds like they're surrendering to them instead. The album title itself comes from "Coffin Car”, where McGee imagines a frozen letter jutting out of the ground, then strolls about for five minutes detailing oblique visions of grey horses, curtained rooms, and shiny smokestacks. This, like much of the record, doesn’t build a song so much as it does a series of Rorschach splotches. Everything finally comes together at the end with a big glam blowout, as McGee screams, “I’m tired over your love.” What should be a hollering celebration, though, does little more than force a smile.
As the record closes with the too-fried psych “Eyes Of Death”, it's clear that Frozen Letter exudes ambition without having accomplished much. Spider Bags all but perfected lolling alt-country on Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, but Frozen Letter's sallow, raw feel doesn’t sync up with its songwriting. There's a limp, mostly-constructed skeleton of a great rock record here, and maybe that's exactly what it's meant to be. So what Spider Bags do here isn't as thrilling as their previous efforts, which left listeners on the edge of your seat, wondering if everything would fall apart. Regardless, it's easy to commiserate with Frozen Letter, as there's empathy to be found in hearing Spider Bags tirelessly trying to put these songs back together.
