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Reviews for Colin Spring and The Band That Murdered Silence “Cancion del Pollo”
The Big Takeover-June 2005
Prior to forming this four piece in 2000, Seattle based Spring had recorded two solo albums (1998’s Dashboard Tallies, Pedestrian Kills and 2000’s Meet The Sea….Or Be Washed Up). The band’s alt-country sound brings to mind an amalgan of Wilco, The Byrds, Bruce Springsteen, Miracle Legion, and even The Feelies, with Spring’s acoustic guitar interacting naturally with Michael Hallett’s electric, coaxed along by Fran Hapke’s brisk drum fills. But despite the relatively similiar song structures, it’s Spring’s enormously insightful, heartfealt lyrics, which he sings in a narrative, Dylan-like vocal style, that constantly keep the listener absorbed. ”A Jukebox To Put My Dimes In” and “Clean Out The Boxes, Ma” (which feature Melinda Friedman’s attractive backing vocals) are both sincere and moving, while the more potent “Miles” builds to a rousing, emotion-drenched climax. With nary a weak moment, this excellent LP ranks among the most pleasant surprises of the year. -Mark Suppanz
…other recent reviews …..
Left Off The Dial -March 31-05
Cancion del Pollo means Song of the Chicken, and is certainly not the most romantic of album titles. But as singer/songwriter/leader of The Band That Murdered Silence Colin Spring explains with a poem in his liner notes, he’s not actually writing about poultry. The “chicken” is the common man, the working class – and its song “stutters and starts like a factory belt full of chicken parts.” If Spring didn’t sing the Song of the Chicken, he asks, “who than [sic] shall it be?” Luckily, Spring is a lover of everyday people and their forgotten stories, and he tells 13 of them on Cancion…
Spring’s own story is biography-worthy, as proven in the mini one he scripted on his web site. He tells the tale of his “disenfranchised bookworm” mother, who reared Spring on her own after his father died in a car accident and her second husband served time for dealing dope. As a child, he was embarrassed of his low-income housing and craved summers, when he would visit his wealthy grandparents on the East Coast. However, in retrospect Spring notes, “I can see why that life drove my mother out west and why I would not trade any of those boring comforts for the teepee or the Goodwill’s or the random hodge podge of drinking mugs in the kitchen cabinets.”
The tales he tells are no less humble and just as interesting. Putting the Spring in Springsteen, Colin knows how to wordsmith predictable short stories into dazzling folk epics. Opening track “Come Back, Baby Jean” is the umpteenth recounting of two jaded kids that run away from home to seek their fortune – but Spring’s couple are “Poorly skilled and richly reckless, they drove off into the sunset/A scripted cliché of the young and feckless on a quest to where the Coke runs bottomless.” In “Sweet Repose,” a typical summer evening is turned into a torture chamber, from which a “sweat-soaked dying moon wants so bad to be a survivor.” There are tinges of Tom Petty in Spring’s many moments of low-class desperation, and the dozens of ideas stuffed into each line call Elvis Costello to mind.
Like Costello, Spring’s music is built for the lyrics. The folk-rock sound is unfinished and raw, complementing his understated style; Pay attention, Spring’s down-home poetry cannot be denied, making this Cancion enjoyable for all but the most pretentious listeners.
Americana Uk
Cancion Del Pollo” (Independent 2004) Remember cow-punk and all those breakneck bone-shaking anthems where everything was speeded up and the songs always threatened to get away, like a child holding on too tightly to a squirming cat? The vocals slightly gruff, getting used to not shouting, the melodies almost obscured but shining through as they do on ‘Come On Down (To My End of the Dial)’ brings back all those memories of God’s Favourite Band, Coffin Break and the like. Then they can slow things right down too - ‘Sweet Repose’ has a lovely few moments of calm where the accordion adds pastoral whimsy to these sand in the carburettor sounds. Fun in a slightly scuffed version of Pete Krebs way.
While this band would surely fall nicely into an alternative rock category, they have their feet firmly planted in old school song writers like Dylan, ’70’s country tinged sounds like those created by The Eagles and folk and country and even punk traditions. The result is a very genuine and evocative mix that is quite entertaining.-Music Street Journal -2005
………Some reviews for “Meet the Sea….Or Be Washed Up” and “Dashboard Tallies, Pedestrian Kills”
Meet the Sea… or Be Washed Up, a dozen devastating, complex, authoritative sea shanties of urban disconsolation…the best club show I’ve seen since Modest Mouse’s incendiary hometown gigs at the Crocodile two years ago….The rare occasions when a band plays a perfect set (whatever that may mean: some force, a synchronicity between the songs) are an amazing experience. One feels incredibly lucky to have witnessed a special thing developing…Meet the Sea… or Be Washed Up is quite simply the best local record since Modest Mouse’s second album. The record that begins with “Santa Domingo” is going to be better than best; it will be a classic - The Stranger live review
Meet the Sea… or Be Washed Up (Home Recorded Culture) ****
Ten songs of ominous prophecy and psychological squalor; the title track sounds sort of like an acoustic Nick Cave, minus the theatrics. The quotes from Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, and Thomas Pynchon in the liner notes are unnecessary but confirm what the first listen to this record leads one to suspect: an orientation that is literary in the best sense — that is, serious and unpretentious. None of these songs are less than honest, bitter, and heartfelt. With a more pop sensibility, this record would bear considerable resemblance to Elvis Costello’s King of America.
But Spring is happy to substitute depth and sweep for hooks and wit. How long has it been since somebody made a record that erred, if at all, on the side of intelligence, and yet wasn’t “math rock”? Not many singer-songwriters understand the acoustic guitar’s potential to lead a line of narrative into a recitation of mystical dimensions. Colin Spring does — to put it mildly. “Disappearing Act” and the elegies “The Old Javelina” and “Let Me Die in the Summertime” shift seamlessly from the personal (”And I got so lonely last night/I sat out in your car/Imagined you were driving me through time”) to the political: “Let me tell you ’bout the West Coast/East came and they bulldozed/And they threw up some landmarks on the sides of the roads/When they forgot about those… And they orphaned their histories/And they left strips like these/ Where a man and a woman can come/And start all over again” (from “Aurora Blvd.”). These songs come straight out of the current chaos of infrastructural and moral sprawl; Rohypnol rapists, motel TV-junkies, deadbeat dads, and minimum-wage workers stealing wine from their employers are not used as color (nor are they seen from a standard “literary” distance), but together endure a senseless civilization where the singer clings to memory and history in order to survive.
Just as often, Spring weaves metaphoric imagery into emotional portraits that never resort to cliché or empty rhetoric. His phrasing is reminiscent of the late Townes Van Zandt, but without that artist’s crippling unevenness. Every song counts on this one, and with it, Spring lands in the company of the most important talents this town has produced in recent years. The Stranger - album review
Dashboard Tallies, Pedestrian Kills is a beautifully poetic record full of whispered lyrics, biting rhymes and bitter sweet songs. Insite Magazine
In this age of co modified rebellion it’s easy to forget the underground soldiers on with thoughtful battle-scarred singers like Colin Spring. Larry Rosen Seattle Weekly
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