“All is calm, nothing is right,” Al Spx sings at the end of “A Broken Memory”, the first song on Cold Specks’ second album, Neuroplasticity. But, coming from her, the line is as much proud affirmation as it is grave prognostication—because it’s precisely the kind of purgatory she calls home. The music of Cold Specks exists somewhere between log-cabin warmth and wintry forest chill, between exquisite elegance and raw release, between young compulsion and old-soul wisdom. And this ambiguity extends to Spx herself: she has the kind of voluminous voice that can fill an entire church without the aid of a microphone, but she’s not one for the showboating theatrics of the pulpit. (For all the Southern Baptist allusions her music inspires, she’s actually a lapsed Muslim.) And yet her adoption of an alias suggests a certain appreciation for artifice, and reminds us that we shouldn’t confuse the in-your-face intimacy of her songs for autobiography.
Of all the evocative words in the title of Cold Specks’ 2012 debut, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, the most telling was “predict.” That album heralded the emergence of a striking talent with immense potential, but you also got the sense that Spx was being extra-cautious and meticulous on her maiden foray, and that the real fireworks would come once she got more comfortable as both a bandleader and spotlight-conditioned singer. Neuroplasticity is an encouraging next step towards that, but it’s not so much Spx that’s changed as her backing band, who seem less like they’re respectfully following their frontwoman’s lead as forcefully unleashing the simmering tension that’s always been an undercurrent in her work.
Of course, hanging out with Swans helps. Neuroplasticity is another summit for the mutual-appreciation society that was forged when Cold Specks covered Swans’ “Reeling the Liars In” for a 2012 Record Store Day EP, earning Michael Gira’s endorsement in the process. Spx’s recent guest appearance on To Be Kind was actually her returning the favor for Gira’s two previously recorded cameos on Neuroplasticity, which aren’t so much showcase turns as demonic possessions, his unmistakably grim tones quietly echoing Spx’s lyrics on the roiling “Exit Plan” and the cabaret-ballad creeper “A Season of Doubt” like an inner voice instructing her to do terrible things. At 35 minutes total, Neuroplasticity is only 43 seconds longer than the Swans song Spx lent her voice to, but the band’s specter hangs over the record like the blackest of clouds, infecting everything from the diseased Dixieland squawks of the opening “A Broken Memory”, to the climactic, mallet-swinging crashes of “Old Knives” to the foghorn-powered, percussive thrust of “Absisto”. The result is the most captivating music Spx has produced to date, made all the more so by the authoritative poise she projects in even the most calamitous surroundings. Her cryptic yet commanding words comfort and unsettle in equal measure—after all, this is a singer who can deliver a line like “all I got is love and grace” with the same clear-eyed conviction as “I smother with you with silence until you choke on dead air.”
However, even within a compact 10-song set that sees her boldly bolstering her sound, Neuroplasticity encounters pacing problems that undermine its mission. In particular, the trio of tracks that comprise the album’s mid-section—“A Quiet Chill”, “Exit Plan”, and “Let Loose the Dogs”—sees Spx lock into familiar melodic and structural patterns, tackling an opening hymn-like verse with minimal accompaniment before the booming drums kick in to send the chorus aloft with clockwork proficiency. Even the refreshingly anomalous “Bodies at Bay”—which introduces a gliding motorik rhythm that will endear Spx all the more to her Broken Social Scene bosses at her Canadian label, Arts & Crafts—ultimately halts its spirited momentum for a slow, swaying, skyward chorus, as if walling Spx back into a comfort zone that much of this record makes great strides in dismantling. The takeaway here is that, two albums in, Cold Specks have the graceful part down pat—but there’s room for more expulsion.
