In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.”
The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding.
Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up.
The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed.
As lyricists, the Spook School are most effective when they tackle the bleak and routine. On the glum ballad “Alright (Sometimes),” Nye offers self-imposed ignorance as a coping mechanism for reality. “I said let’s pretend the world’s all right/Let’s pretend we’re doing fine,” he suggests before (almost) finding comfort in a companion: “But with you I feel all right/Sometimes.” It’s one of the record’s most candid moments, and yet the song itself is bit of a snoozer, following a verse/chorus/bridge/coda recipe with little energy or improvisation. A similar problem plagues “Bad Year,” which does a fine job of verbally rendering despondence; unfortunately, the melody sounds worn out, too. “I admire your optimism/But sometimes I just need to feel it,” Nye shrugs, his words floating atop a diluted indie slow dance. These few duds are missing both the honesty and the dynamite hooks of the band’s best work, like the trans-positive “Body,” where the brothers Todd get personal: “Do you like the way you look naked?/I don’t know if any of us do/And I still hate my body/But I’m learning to love what it can do.”
The Spook School are idealists at heart. Their inclusive lyrics and perky guitar pop mirror the change they hope to summon in the world. Adam Todd has said that Could It Be Different? was written “from a place of feeling like everything definitely isn’t alright now.” Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity.
