Mild Peril and Nostalgia for a Small Town
Music You Can Chuck a Newspaper To in Downstate Illinois
The Spend
Mild Peril
Released on Mar 09, 2010
Every so often an album will strike you somewhere between whatever’s just beneath the sternum and the labyrinth of the ear, and speak to that something inside you that maybe hasn’t been nourished in too long a while. The Spend’s debut has done just that. Mild Peril is possessed of a certain small town charm, but a charm absent the silly asteism and religious fervor and otherwise unattractive connotative baggage usually associated with words like “small town” and “charm.”
The Spend is Illinois-native Matt Shaw and whoever’s responsible for the really well-done and terribly sparse tracking and production, and Mild Peril sounds the way certain lo-fi or indie records tend to sound: acoustic and quiet and coffeeshop and faux-folk. Except it isn’t really faux. The vocals aren’t effortless or strained, but earnest and honest. Each song reminds me of something else that I’d forgotten. The album doesn’t settle on anything overly familiar, which is how, strangely, it really sounds like Home.
Mild Peril is lyrical the way ancient Greeks used to be. It’s just Shaw on vocals, as far as I can tell, but feels like something choral Pindar would’ve penned. The effect is more hymnal than homily, and The Spend extract everything that’s lovely from gospel and scripture. “Acts” is eerie as shit, all sitar distortion and warbling echoes, and a little like moving through an awfully ambiguous LSD trip: the mellow lull of yellow meadowlarks leaping from a black gate’s cant, none of the trembling and reeling into that terrible Unconscious; the edge of each chord like cracks in the sky.
“Bloomington” opens with hella
reverb and softly, like cicadas in the low brush buzzing. Then
Shaw’s guitar, solo, on a makeshift stage in a church basement or
local bar, anywhere off I-55 or -74. Lots of green sky and hailstones.
Corn arranged in rows off Rte. 9, alive with fireflies and the electric
red of windmills in the distance. Or at least that’s how I hear
it. Probably mostly because Bloomington, IL is my hometown too,
and the way I remember it very much aligns with Mild Peril’s
quickening calm. It’s the same weird recognition as when you
every so often find yourself thinking about kids you used to know and
what happened to them anyway, and you find them on Facebook and turns
out they all have kids and families of their own now. Some of
them have songs and bands and brand-new albums.
Something about the album makes me awfully nostalgic. I keep thinking about myself at a very young age growing up in downstate Illinois. I used to deliver newspapers in the early AM light of junior and senior high school, and would cut through our backyard by the green box with 50KV on its side and down a street called Dallas. I delivered to the big apartment complex in our neighborhood, and mastered the doorstep-from-three-parking-spaces-away arc over mini- and Astrovans. I didn’t find out until many years later that I’d delivered to the Shaw residence on a regular basis, right there on Dallas.
But really, it’s not this picture of the past I want, not the world of newspapers and early morning rising. It’s nostalgia for some neo-present where my life is aligned or things are way simpler and needlepoint maxims like Home Is Where The Heart Is are more than just maxims. Maybe this album supplies something like that. Maybe what Mild Peril has that I’ve been missing for so long is reverence. Nothing polite or old-school obedient, but art really, genuinely rendered. It’s enchanting the way something very real without gloss or sheen will catch the attention with a whisper.
I’ve listened to the 11 Track playlist well over twenty times now, and I’m convinced by The Spend’s ability to transport my imagination from winter’s grip to a remembered Midwest and fishing with earthworms or the sky blue sky of summer afternoons. Because I’m sitting here in a Chicago Cubs sweatshirt drinking coffee from a mug with I ♥ NYC on its side, listening to someone sing about a town I’ve all but forgotten, and wishing almost more than anything to return.
High Point
Mild Peril is possessed of a certain small town charm, compelling and rending and terribly melodic room music.
Low Point
The sloppy pathos and totally abject tone I’ve managed to maintain this entire time.
Posted by Diego Baez on Mar 03, 2010 @ 6:00 am
