Castle rock

The Spinanes build Arches and Aisles

by Stephanie Zacharek

Rebecca Gates

The title of the third Spinanes album, Arches and Aisles (Sub Pop; in stores this Tuesday), implies a kind of formality of structure, as if it were a work with the dignified posture and immaculately squared joints of a great cathedral. Arches and Aisles is cathedral-like, but not in the way you might think: instead of a grand building, impressive and well-maintained, it's more like the bare bones of an ancient structure, the kind of thing you'd stumble onto out in the English countryside, a lonely edifice partially decimated by a long-ago fire or war. The wind whistles through, the sky shows through, and blades of grass push their way between the stones -- yet as a structure, it's magnificent precisely because it's half implied. The imagination finishes it off more eagerly than a corps of earnest repairmen ever could have. It's lavish in its half-whispered simplicity.

It might seem like a misstatement to call an album built around spare, spindly guitar melodies "lavish," but somehow, by the end, Arches and Aisles is exactly that. The Spinanes aren't even a true band: the only permanent member is singer, guitarist, and songwriter Rebecca Gates, who enlists other musicians as needed. (The Spinanes were formerly a duo comprising Gates and drummer Scott Plouf, who left the band in 1996 to become a member of Built To Spill.) But the fact that Gates is now virtually solo -- on Arches and Aisles, she's supported by a number of musicians including Sam Prekop of the Sea and Cake and John McEntire, of that band and Tortoise -- seems only to have energized her.

Arches and Aisles is a more delicate-sounding disc than the Spinanes' last, the luminous Strand (Sub Pop), but if anything, it's more forceful, more confident. There's nothing tentative about the way Gates sings, in her driftwood-and-pearl voice, lines like "I can't stand to hear you speak/Or to listen to you sleep." Her guitar lines seem to meander and toddle at first, but the more you listen, the more you hear how they criss-cross over and support one another, like the threads of a cat's cradle. They're like wire armatures for the songs, specimens of both fragility and tensile strength. The percussion rounds them out with extra shaping and shading. On "Kid in Candy," the album's spectacular opener, a programmed bongo spits out a rhythm that's oddly pleasing in its precision, like a battalion of doughnuts popping onto a conveyor belt in perfect dotted lines; the simple rhythm that snakes through "Eleganza" sounds like nothing so much as a ruler beating time on the edge of a desk.

But it's Gates's lyrics, half-connected and yet, almost paradoxically, completely plugged in, that give Arches and Aisles its bracing, moody energy, its desperate colors. It's always hard to figure out exactly what these songs are about: they beg you to trust your instincts. "Den Trawler" is festooned with guitar lines that sound sozzled, as if they'd been steeped in brandy; an occasional piano note drops down like a snowflake, giving the song an icy spareness. Before you even hear the lyrics ("Sentimental fool, have you missed it again?/Christmas is coming with its white balls of flame"), you might guess that "Den Trawler" is a Christmas song -- a reminder that the mindless cheerfulness of the season can serve as a backdrop for the most exquisite emotional torture. (Anybody who's suffered through a holiday season in which a loved one has recently flipped out, or skipped out, knows exactly what I mean.) "We're shaking toward shelter and vodka on ice/And looking for words to `Auld Lang Syne'/God grant us grace in working the room/God grant me patience, caught in his sight."

Gates captures the nerve-shredding terror of being trapped at a party, circling a former lover who now couldn't care less -- she conjures the uselessness of being forced to make nicey-nice when you simply feel like crumpling. "Cocktail, money maker, ice breaker," she sings with a polite scowl in her voice, putting a significant pause between "cock" and "tail." She knows full well the two words belong together, but she can't help breaking them apart as if with an icepick.

The most mysterious, and maybe most wondrous, song of all is "Heisman Stance," which seems to be directed toward a lover who's broken off the relationship but whose hold is stronger than ever. "Still swimming toward your hands when all is said and done/Locked in a Heisman stance, and I don't trust a thing, why don't you prove me wrong?" Gates may be the last person in the world you'd expect to use a sports metaphor -- but then again, why not? "And later on we're not as wild/skimming through the motions, robotic in devotion" -- the lines have something of the skittering poetry of a play-by-play, and if that's not a fine metaphor for love, then what is? Gates has a knack for taking the mundane and elevating it beyond the clouds, sending it drifting past your wildest dreams on its way. It's what she implies, rather than what she says, that sticks with you long after you've closed your eyes.