Pete Wall
As anyone with even a passing interest in the band will already be well aware, Spanish Love Songs’ output is emotionally raw to say the least, and frequently sees frontman Dylan Slocum wrestling with the how the hell to make it through another trip around the sun. The collective catharsis of a crowd scream-singing along to every word of song after heart-rending song is as potent as it’s ever been in a live setting, and those who connect with Slocum’s lyrical output experience the same at-a-remove kinship cultivated by the very best songwriters. For a band with so many hooks, it’s the one that gets right into the meat of your heart that leaves the greatest impression.
A Brief Intermission in the Flattening of Time is a record enriched by its collaborations. Opener ‘Lifers Too’, featuring The Wonder Years, functions as a thematic companion to the track ‘Lifers’ from No Joy. The original track presents a ‘lifer’ as a person who essentially escapes the gravitational pull of self-obliteration while at once being condemned to a life sentence in this world. On ‘Lifers Too’ there’s a somewhat deceptive pep in the step of the music that builds to the almost breezy refrain, “We don’t need this boulder, so we just let it roll”, before we’re brought back down with the following: “You thought I was a lifer / I never thought I’d get this old”. Yeah, there’s the sting of that hook again.
‘Cocaine & Lexapro’ features delicate vocal accompaniment from Kevin Devine and opens like a downcast MUNA song before settling into a mid-tempo groove that washes over you and leaves behind the disquieting residue of the line, “A pilot’s still a pilot ‘til he crashes the plane”. Follow-up ‘Heavenhead’ veers dangerously towards SLS-by-numbers territory in shape and imagery, but is lifted by the female voices of Illuminati Hotties bringing some texture to the chorus.
As if to underline the vitality provided by the features on this record, the best is saved for last with Tigers Jaw elevating the synth-heavy closer ‘Berlin’, a track awash with Angelo Bandalamenti-style mystique and melancholy. The record drifts off into the night and leaves behind it the sense that this was a rest stop on the way to some as-yet-unknown destination. It’s a trip worth taking, but the road is so very dark.