by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Tim Kinsella’s entire career makes a strong case for art as a vocation. Across his discography, spanning multiple high-concept bands with a penchant for emotional openness, Kinsella has created music that feels distinctly out of time, the product of a circle of collaborators that trusted each other’s ideas more than conventional wisdom. They wanted to reach their audience, but not at the cost of compromising their art. With Giddy Skelter, Kinsella and Jenny Pulse take that approach further and adopt a dual purpose: art as a way of interacting with and understanding the world around them, a personal tool; and art as instruction manual or even political pamphlet, a tool for others. The duo put out a zine entitled “How to Make the Album You Want to Make” using the creation of Giddy Skelter as a case study, detailing the budget (functionally zero), the approach (disciplined), and the logistics (discouraging), in order to show that making the album you want is possible, despite the bleak odds of making anything in America that isn’t guaranteed to make someone else money.
The opening track, “Unblock Obstacles,” whirrs to life, evoking both the physical act of playing an LP or cassette tape and the impression of being an aged or out of time artifact — part of the fabric of a thing despite being previously unheard. It’s a tuneful, driving number, taking a bird’s eye view on some of the functions of creation on Giddy Skelter: to build a complex system so that something simple, nourishing, and elemental can emerge, while honing your craft enough that your ideas can be conveyed fluidly. The guitar playing is the simplest of Kinsella’s career, stemming from him taking guitar lessons in order to approach the instrument like a novice. It’s the closest he gets to the “straight forward guitar rock” that has often been asked of him, but even learning how to downstroke in standard tuning doesn’t saw off his idiosyncracies, his figures finding themselves winding into repetitive grooves. When the guitar switches from a lopsided, three chord riff to an insistent drone and uneasy soundscapes, all the metrical space taken up by the guitar ends up mimicking the lyrics when he sings, “make space available to fill it in again.”
The band’s “collage rock” tag is interesting, a term that’s also been used by similarly expansive groups like Spirit of the Beehive (though the reference points are different). It captures a home-spun sense of looseness in the recordings, with the components of the songs often feeling like unusual puzzle pieces, inscrutable on their own but come together to form a larger picture. This approach is magnified in the pair of instrumental tracks “Every House Has a Door 3,” made up primarily of a swirling sample, searching major key guitar figure, and some gently discordant slides, and “Every House Has a Door 4,” which features a more insistent, menacing tone in the plod of the drums and the minimalist, minor key guitars. Each of the tracks is under two minutes, exploring a similar approach from different angles. At this point in the record, one gets the sense that Kinsella and Pulse are trying to incite the listener’s creative curiosity, casting the listener as more co-conspirator than consumer by asking how many different directions an idea can go in.
The way the record interacts with music history is probably its most pervasive non-lyrical theme — it’s in the amalgamation of the album title — and it allows them to reference without shyness, like the use of the “Be My Baby” drumbeat in “Whinny” during the verses, which sounds so at home on the track you can almost avoid the shock of recognition. It’s a piano driven track, somewhere between John Carpenter and Broadcast, a spooky backing track with warm, inviting melodies on top, with Pulse sounding as mournful as anything Julee Cruise sang on the Twin Peaks soundtrack as she reflects on her desire to answer a call that hasn’t come, a call she might not be able to answer over the noise of real life. The lyrics are oblique, deftly balancing the banality of powerlessness with the sublime of the natural world in a way that inverts the more aspirational depiction of the future in “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones (played briefly in the album’s partial-namesake documentary).
Jenny Pulse adds a noirish but playful tinge to the record, somewhere between Sky Ferreira and Robyn. Her contributions feel like a natural continuation of the poppier work on her solo album Marmalade, leaning a little more into a minimalist R&B direction that meshes well with her more sensory-based lyrics. She has a knack for compressing and elongating time in surprising ways through both her lyrics and melodies, like in “Nena,” a retelling of sexual violence that’s wrapped up in memories of a friend that isn’t around anymore, the place where it happened becoming somewhere Pulse (or her character) is forced to haunt (“But I’m still a prisoner / Daring escape / faking fun / playing with the playful guards”). It begins with beautiful and then curdling piano notes fumbling their way towards a jaunty rhythm before colliding with ethereal electronics and transforming into a different song entirely with the introduction of her vocals. Pulse delivers all her lyrics in the final minute and a half of the track, somehow maintaining a conversational element despite the density and intimacy of what she’s singing to you.
Shedding the protection and distance of a band name is a disarming move, namely because there is less to shield Kinsella or Pulse from the crutch of reading the songs as pure autobiography. It’s also bold, both evoking singer-songwriters of the past presenting their art as unadorned with branding as possible and visual artists presenting their work as a statement presented on its own merits, with the only context that truly matters being the artists’ own past work. Giddy Skelter is by no means a backwards looking record, and the way its attention to process end up placing the duo in similar sonic territory to the most forward thinking of their guitar-based peers speaks to the continued strength and vision of their work. While the record itself resists readings rooted in nostalgia or easy categorization by drawing us into the immediacy of its world without using the standard rock and roll approach, Kinsella and Pulse seal the deal by foregrounding their work process and emerging with something completely unlike most of today’s underground music while being all the better for it.