by Lucio Oquendo III
Chicago has birthed an awful lot of strange music over the last thirty years, though the particular brand of strange embodied by the rock band Spirits Having Fun on their first album Auto-Portrait doesn’t fit a particular sonic home base. Auto-Portrait is free of strict confines on what music should be and what it has been. Music that is this human can’t be created from a computer or a single person, but it does stem from the cohesive collaboration of the freed minds of Katie McShane (vocals/guitars), Andrew Clinkman (guitars/vocals), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Phil Sudderberg (drums). On all nine tracks, it appears as if this band strived to make music for themselves, something the quartet could feel in their core—maybe that is how all music should be. Punk is often about immediacy, but what if instead of furiously throwing everything you have against a wall, you spent a great deal of time thinking about it and then built a photographic mural out of pointillism. This is how I visualize the record Auto-Portrait: compositionally complex musical murals with simple lines.
The beauty of sound that this band conceptualizes could place the creation of this record anytime from 1968 up to the present day. The drum production and vocals sound quite modern compared to the bass and guitars, but I've heard similar drum sounds from jazz records of the period. In a post-Beatles-eight-track dream world, Auto-Portrait would fit perfectly anywhere between then and now. Kudos to credited engineers, Dave Vettraino and Dylan McKinstry, for keeping the vibe without getting too lost in modern production techniques.
McShane's and Clinkman's vocals conjure comparisons when in contrast to the old school style instrumentation. This is not a bad thing; there is a unique “club” of bands that do this well, and in my book, Spirits Having Fun fits in that club because of their compositional artistry, approach and execution. Clinkman's quaky, phased-out surf guitar paired with McShane’s vocally reinforced maestro fuzztone-esque lines perfectly pair together and take up just enough sonic real estate in the stereo field to allow Heasly's rounded, warm bass to occupy whatever Sudderberg's jazz-club kit does not.
The music is quirky and backwards at times without it feeling like a joke to the listener or to the artist. Music like this can either take itself too seriously or too lightly, but Spirits Having Fun meticulously balances the very fine line. One thing that helps Auto-Portrait is the length of the album and the jam-packed quality of solid music. The record is a mere 23 minutes, but it’s chock full of information. While it's hard to know where one song ends and another begins, each instrument fits neatly and reinforces another, making a whole out of parts that might not hold on their own. It is a masterpiece of arrangement perfectly suited for the quartet.
“Waiting at the Airport” is the magnum opus of the record and a great introduction to the group. It is the longest song by a mile, complete with meandering noise, guitar solos, and drastic changes in mood, tempo, and color. It shows everything the band does well. The hooks and the sing-ability really make this song stand out from the rest.
“Gift Shopping” is a particularly intense and awarding experience. It seems to want to fall apart but always comes together, with sections driving a particular mood. Instrumentally speaking, this is possibly the darkest the album gets. “Alligators Below in B Flat” and “Plastic Party Perfect” pair together like Ethiopian coffee and a slice of tart blueberry pie. Perhaps the pairing goes so well musically because they tear through an entire rainbow of emotions in a short amount of time.
To be honest, the lyrics in Auto-Portrait are beyond me. The content is probably something that only the band knows or understands. This isn't a critique; lyrics don't have to make sense to the listeners. My favorite part about music is centered around the transcendence of what is humanly possible to comprehend—it doesn't always have to come from the words we write, but how we can express ourselves in ways that words cannot explain, and this idea of transcendence is fully shown by Spirits Having Fun throughout Auto-Portrait.