It's not mandatory for great bands to balance a dominant vocal personality with a foil, but it makes sense that it happens so often. A good No. 2 doesn't need to be less interesting than the star-- Flavor Flav is surely a more magnetic figure than Chuck D, for example-- but at best, they establish a necessary contrast that casts the lead in sharper relief. The star shines brighter, the subtext runs deeper, and the emotional range gets broader. In indie rock terms, think of how Kim Deal's easy-going stoner femininity emphasizes Black Francis' tightly-wound nerd masculinity, or the way Lee Renaldo's hipster everyman style offsets the larger-than-life personae of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.
Pavement may not have had a vocal dynamic as profound as Public Enemy, the Pixies, or Sonic Youth, but Stephen Malkmus had his appropriate foil in the form of Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg. Spiral was no less shambling and inscrutable, but he was very good at playing the self-effacing underdog to Malkmus' nonchalant indie alpha male. It would be an error to label his songs as more "sincere"-- he was consistently a far more cryptic and opaque lyricist than SM-- but he was capable of projecting a nervous vulnerability that destabilized the freakishly self-assured vibe of Pavement's first four albums in a way that was positive and necessary. Even if Spiral Stairs was not crucial to either Pavement's appeal or Malkmus' success, his presence offered a subtle balance and contrast, and yielded at least a few classics: "Kennel District" from Wowee Zowee; "Date With Ikea" from Brighten the Corners.
In the time since Pavement's dissolution in 1999, Kannberg has stepped into the role of the frontman with mixed results. Despite the nod to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass in its title, his debut as the leader of the Preston School of Industry did not reveal him to be an extraordinary songwriter obscured by the flash of his former partner, but rather just a serviceable author of amiable but not especially interesting indie rock. He pushed himself further by embracing alt-country on the follow-up, Monsoon, but the record was a tuneless, dreary mess, and it is undoubtedly the worst release ever to be associated with anyone having to do with Pavement. The central problem with the Preston School of Industry albums is that the very things that made Kannberg an effective foil for Malkmus also made him exhausting and dull as the focal point of a band. Whereas he was once the Milhouse Van Houten to Malkmus' Bart Simpson, he had devolved into being an incoherent indie equivalent of Milhouse's dad mewling "Can I Borrow a Feeling?"
After a five-year hiatus from recording, Kannberg has dissolved the Preston School of Industry, or perhaps more accurately, rebranded the project as Spiral Stairs. This is a sensible decision. Preston School of Industry was a terrible name for a band, and Spiral Stairs was always one of the better stage names in alt-rock. The reversion to the Stairs moniker could be taken as a signal that Kannberg has returned to form, but anyone expecting anything along the lines of his Pavement tunes will be let down by the contents of The Real Feel, his first record under the name.
Kannberg's new music mostly takes its cues from Neil Young and mid-period Bob Dylan, and to a certain extent, the ragged yet expansive sound suits his strengths as a guitarist and his weaknesses as an often aggravatingly nasal vocalist. "True Love", the album opener, is confident and sharp despite feeling more than a bit generic, and tracks like "Maltese T" and "Cold Change" are minor works, yet successful on their own terms. Even the weakest cuts on The Real Feel are at least passable genre exercises, but at a point it becomes difficult to tell whether they are actually good faux-Neil Young songs, or if these tunes would have any appeal at all to listeners who were not hardcore Pavement fans with an unusually large amount of goodwill for the band's less famous founding member.
Though he is still prone to writing nonsense lyrics nearly devoid of resonance, Kannberg has opened up significantly as a lyricist, though his most emotional and unguarded moments on "Call the Ceasefire" and "Blood Money" are mostly quite banal. Unlike many of his previous works, he seems far more interested in revealing himself and connecting with an audience, but even though his voice has grown stronger, he still sings everything as if he can't stand to make eye contact with you. The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases. His style may shift, but Kannberg remains an unambitious songwriter and underwhelming frontman. It could just be that he's the type of person who best thrives as a second banana. Then again, maybe all he needs is a foil of his own.
