Spain

The unease that ran through the American West Coast in the first half of the '90s didn't only find expression in the (post-)adolescent outbursts of grunge. The other side of the coin, human and artistic, of grunge's stark reckonings with reality and its immediacy of abrasive rock impact, was instead represented by a far more intimate and limited dimension, confined to the private sphere but no less anguished or authentic than a rage screamed at the world over dirty guitars and feverish rhythms.

A thousand miles south of rainy Seattle, providing a stark counterpoint to sunny California, shadowy artists of marked sensitivity were taking their first steps, finding in shade, isolation and muted tones the expressive vehicle for their stories of everyday heartbreak. Although their paths never crossed, there's a common thread (blue, in fact) linking two chroniclers of introversion like Mark Kozelek and Josh Haden, both entirely alien to the mechanisms of music-industry communication, and both capable of elevating their melancholic emotionality into an art form as understated as it is genuine and intensely powerful.

While Kozelek was already astonishing and moving listeners with "Down Colorful Hill", Haden was still trying his hand in obscure rock bands, before embarking, in 1993, on the solo venture of Spain, a project as far removed from the towering figure of his father (jazz double bassist Charlie) as it was from a musical climate largely inattentive, save for rare exceptions, to a sentimental intimacy made of refined nuances and slowed-down acoustic sounds.

More than a classic indie band, the Spain that emerged for their studio debut were a kind of ensemble built around the core quartet of founders Haden and Ken Boudakian (bass and guitar), fellow guitarist Merlo Podelwski and drummer Evan Hartzell, joined over the course of the album by Josh's two sisters, Petra and Tanya, tasked with heightening the chamber-music nuances of a music whose defining traits, beyond its founding elements, lie in the spirit with which it was made.

Initially recorded in rudimentary fashion during a summer the band spent on a Swedish island, "The Blue Moods Of Spain" faithfully captures the Baltic calm of that setting through relaxed atmospheres, far removed from contemporary frenzy, in which to take refuge for renderings, at once soft and pained, of a blue(s) understood in its threefold sense of melancholy, expressive attitude and chromatic connotation (it's no coincidence that the album's artwork appears to be an overt homage to Blue Note).

It can therefore only be feeling that drives a debut which is, paradoxically, striking precisely because of its studied understatement: "Love is my only devotion/ Ten little steps to the ocean/ Ten nights to decide/ Whether I can live alone", Haden intones in a hushed tone on "Ten Nights", a catatonic waltz that links up with the slow, measured notes and terse harmonic loops of opener "It's So True". From the very start of the record, the band's clear preference for a bare-bones form is evident, one that even tends to forgo melodic linearity, often setting the music and Josh's serene vocals on separate tracks, his role in turn taking on the guise of a crooner who has forsaken his charm in favor of a flat, monotone delivery perfectly suited to his unsparing snapshots of the loneliness of exhausted love affairs and searing breakups.

Indeed, aside from an initial surrender to the inevitability of fate ("They say life/ Is never fair [...] They say fate/ Plays cruel jokes"), Haden's romantic desolation is rather the fruit of human behavior, of lies, betrayals and decisions that breed regret and guilt, narrated across the nine tracks in a crescendo of pathos and resignation, faithfully mirrored by increasingly varied and assertive harmonic solutions and structures compared to the simple slow-motion rhythmic segments of the first two songs.

Thus, as early as "Dreaming Of Love" things begin to loosen into fluid "rock" forms, steering the underlying blues framework toward territory close to the contemporary sound of Bedhead and Low; but compared to the former's desert landscapes and the latter's evocative narcolepsy, Spain sketch out a style of their own, musically "classic" and romantically disenchanted, within the constant of an endemic yet ultimately serene and velvety melancholy.

More defined structures appear in the songs at the album's center, made up of the drowsy "Ray Of Light" (a codeine-esque ballad turned acoustic and embellished by Larry Cady's trumpet) and the two most fully realized songs of the bunch, "Untitled #1", with its lively rhythms, and "Her Used-To-Been", which sublimates the lyrics' spleen and abandonment into a slow, nocturnal chamber-jazz stride.

Then there's no avoiding a closer look at the fourteen minutes of "World Of Blue", an elegy to blueness and melancholy, strategically not placed at the album's close despite its long instrumental drift, which moves between choral and chamber textures thanks to the essential contribution of sisters Petra and Tanya, whose sweet vocalizations and aching string flourishes shape the piece into something decidedly more imposing than the rest of the album, straddling post-rock affinities and fragments of blockbuster film score.

Alongside this profile, quite distinctive even within the album's own economy, there are at least three more elements gathered in "The Blue Moods Of Spain" that can be singled out as defining traits of melancholy rendered into music: a tendency toward dilation and slowing down, the restrained chamber-music finishing of the songs, and above all, an intimate, spare singer-songwriter craft, the expression of a spirit ultimately at peace with the inevitability of loss and suffering. Final proof of this lies in the closing invocation of "Spiritual", which better than any words sums up the unvarying blue mood of a record whose greatest merit lies precisely in its ability to convey its deep heartache without ever showing off: "My love wasn't true/ Now all I have is you/ Oh Jesus/ I don't want to die alone [...] If you hear my last breath/ Jesus/ All my troubles/ All my pain/ Will leave once again".

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26/06/2011