The Durham artist is back again with a DIY psych delight.
Words; Lloyd Bolton
After a lengthy absenece, Durham artist Spider Noises makes a welcome return with EP 'Summery Ills,' a fresh reminder of his insatiable love for melody. Based between Durham and Newcastle, where he also plays with Pink Poison, Spider Noises (aka Jack Calvesbert) draws on the rich psychedelia of 60s pop and the wit and tightness of songwriters like Jeffrey Lewis, all produced with limited home recording means. He has been known to employ Tupperware boxes to create really rather convincing drum loops…
Conceived as a song cycle equivalent to the Abbey Road medley, 'Summery Ills' is appropriately packed with overlapping ideas, songs gracefully drifting into each other in a confident weaving of musical ideas. The title track itself packs more distinct melodies into its minute and a half than some fit into a whole album, recalling the relentlessly stacked structure of The Kinks' 'Autumn Almanac'. Its lyrics meanwhile tell of a more contemporary British seasonality, complaining about the heat and fantasising about "kick[ing] the shit out of an ice cream man."
Many of the best Spider Noises moments come from this clashing of charming melody with deadpan humour, and this record provides some new favourites. 'Slam Dancing on a Motorway,' for example, is a fantasy vision of the titular concept, knowingly setting rhythmic freedom against the growing fury of the drivers themselves. This track also recalls the weird spoken interludes which the likes of Gong were known to make profitable use of, the words, "Maybe I'll start a flash mob… at the train station!" drifting out of the song's musical mist.
While other Spider Noises collections offer a wider mixture of timbres, 'Summery Ills' feels defined by its phase-shifted vividity. Even its tenderest moment, 'Walk To Dream,' a mournful morning-after ode set against a backdrop of a funeral proecssion, is delivered on a richly textured soundscape of harmonies and sustained synths, the spoken outro coming over a dew-dripping palette of keys and acoustic guitar. This rewrite of earlier track 'Red + Yellow' from 2019 album 'A Special Train of Sonic Truth' is also a reminder of the rich Spider Noises discography out there to delve into, more populous on Bandcamp than Spotify. For the uninitiated, 'Summery Ills' is a delightful acid-dipped starting place from which to work back, packaged with astute neatness into a tight 20 minutes with its title track serving as something of a theme song… a rare example of a reprise coming out longer than the original.
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