Confidential to C.Spaniels: Ad hominem. We all immediately think of “ad hominem attacks,” stinging personal insults – but other things can be ad hominem. Your songs are. The vessel is a fuzzy, fussy, coy sort of pop that brings Boyracer to mind, though you have much better chops than that band or most others I’ve heard doing that kind of music. But the content is you, all you, all the thoughts and experiences that buzz around in your head. Makes it hard to review – it may sound like I’m attacking your character. I’m not.
I 100% cop to having no clue how the most beloved denizens of my record collection concoct their perfect syntheses of personal detail, gut-check truth, and arty babble. Part of being their fan is trying, from a distance, to perceive that mystery. But with you, there’s no mystery: you sing about your friends (by name), your college campus, your weekend plans. At one point I guessed you’d wind up singing your homework, and then you did (“Finals Season”)!
Speaking of gut-check truth, many of us who assume the mantle of “songwriter manqué” do so as a result of making this mistake sometimes. We tried to live by the Big Boys’ “go start your own band” credo, the K Records nerdy-goofballs-can-rock example. These phenomena were necessary to deflate the idea that one had to be the Rolling Stones in order to be a band; and I don’t mean to set up a similarly insurmountable barrier, to insist that all musicians follow the live-wire, heartpounding examples of Eric Dolphy or early Black Flag exclusively. But singing what you know is one thing; singing about your student center is quite another. Lend the world your artistic vision because you can, yes, but it has to be an artistic vision, not a rumination on how you hate laundry day. Indie rock and its kindred musical movements are right to urge one to be one’s real self, but singing your literal life is taking the lesson one step too far.
The skill with which you navigate your music’s twists and turns indicates that you have the imagination to jump back, establish a level of lyrical remove, and do yourself one better.
---Sal Addays, February 2005