AEM026 Spirit Kid

Those of you famil­iar with Showtime’s Weeds might already have rubbed aural elbows with Spirit Kid (A.K.A. Emeen Zarookian, the man with the most fab­u­lous name in the uni­verse) via an online only promo video (see below) that lifts his madly catchy and jan­gly Ampeater A-side “You Lit Up For Me” and glee­fully rein­ter­prets the lyrics in a way that you need only stare at the song title for two sec­onds to guess at. In fact, the song is secretly an elegy to a lost and puddle-killed cell phone (think about it: you fell down / out of my pocket and into the sea / you lit up for me), and this con­trast between the hid­den, mun­dane inspi­ra­tion and the per­fectly open ended lyrics is a per­fect dis­til­la­tion of Spirit Kid. “You Lit Up For Me” is a per­fect, con­cise pop song, recorded with a warm, full and just slightly muddy sound that sounds both musi­cally and tonally straight out of 1965 (Zarookian lists the Bea­t­les, Kinks, Beach Boys, and Zom­bies as influ­ences and let me tell you, you can hear it in the best way) and yet with a secretly con­tem­po­rary source. Who among us doesn’t know the anx­i­ety of a lost cell phone? Who would think to write a song about it? Meet the Spirit Kid, a man who, in his own words, is try­ing to cap­ture “a child-like will­ing­ness to expe­ri­ence the world with open eyes and a open heart, some­thing that many of us, includ­ing me, often let slip away with our own daily problems.”

Spirit Kid songs are short and crammed to burst­ing with ideas. They stand in direct oppo­si­tion to any­thing even remotely shaggy, as sharply dressed as those afore­men­tioned Eng­lish pop heroes of the six­ties. They would sound sur­gi­cal if they weren’t so damned fun, per­formed with a charm­ing loose­ness that belies the years this album has been in the mak­ing. You can hear lord knows how many Emmens shout­ing “I miss you ter­ri­bly” on “You Lit Up For Me” in a big, bawl­ing cho­rus of voices that you’d never hear on a more cleanly pro­duced (read: ster­ile) album. It’s the kind of shouty vocal har­mony that’s not sup­posed to be per­fectly in har­mony. There’s a thick­ness to this kind of sound that auto­tune can never reach with its unnec­es­sary clar­ity (noth­ing against auto­tune, which can clearly be used to do some cool shit but should never, ever be applied to the vocals in a guitars-bass-drums-catchysongs kind of rock band). Album cut “Wait A Minute” pretty much dis­solves halfway through in a pile of full kit crashes and gui­tar solos before pop­ping back into the bub­bly coun­try pop verses. The fact that Zarookian recorded this entire record him­self (with mix­ing help from Jack Younger of 247 Stu­dios) in bed­rooms, bath­rooms, base­ment rec rooms, graffiti-covered prac­tice spaces, etc., etc., lends the whole thing a warmth and relaxed energy that just doesn’t mate­ri­al­ize in albums con­structed in impos­ing studios.

Though Zarookian’s musi­cal roots lie mostly in the tight (bounce-a-quarter-off-that-song tight) mod pop of decades hence, he has cousins in recent times as well. Dr. Dog, espe­cially on their near-flawless Easy­beat, drew from some of the same pools, bring­ing back the big vocal har­monies and fluid, tra­di­tional har­mony that makes Lennon/Mccartney songs sound so end­lessly inven­tive and yet per­fectly log­i­cal. That style of har­mony (which inci­den­tally is a huge part of why all those girl group pop songs that came out of the Brill Build­ing are so amaz­ing, when you com­bine it with the whole Phil Spec­tor pro­duc­tion style) is mostly neglected these days in favor of a min­i­mal­ist dia­tonic (read: bor­ing, two chords, maybe three) kind of thing.

Another musi­cal rel­a­tive is Elliott Smith, who you can hear in the ascend­ing bridge of B-side “My Imag­i­na­tion”, in the way the melody on another album track (“The World Doesn’t Stop”) resolves down a half step instead of the expected whole step, in the pure melody of the gui­tar solos, in the tight vocal har­monies and use of fancy lit­tle dimin­ished pass­ing chords, and who of course played all the instru­ments on his first few albums much in the way Zarookian does here. But don’t let that make you think the atti­tude here is any­thing but joy­ous or the play­ing any­thing but accom­plished. The drum­ming is propul­sive and never shaky, push­ing the piano riff of “My Imag­i­na­tion” for­ward with enough force to make it sound like a lost Big Star cut. The bass play­ing deserves 1000 words on its own, gen­er­at­ing enough melodies to make about three more records. Check out the way it nav­i­gates the mod­u­lat­ing half-time sec­tion of the bridge of “My Imag­i­na­tion”, just spit­ting out ideas left and right. The piano hits hard and nails the oblig­a­tory giant glis­san­dos at the cli­maxes. The vocals, as men­tioned, per­fectly pin down all the har­monies, for exam­ple the echo­ing I get scareds or ooh la la las in the sec­ond verse of “My Imagination”.

“You Lit Up For Me”, the afore­men­tioned A-side, is a per­fectly crafted pop gem, with crescen­do­ing mobs of voices over the kind of lop­ing coun­try feel that shows up on a few of the other album tracks, here trad­ing off with more reserved, open inter­ludes. The way the vocals build and build up into an avalanche that tum­bles right into the rolling, jounc­ing per­cus­sion of the verses is the most imme­di­ate evi­dence of Spirit Kid’s genius for that long stretched and bruised art form: the song. The mul­ti­ple lay­ers of vocals that emerge after each extended verse chord are per­fect, pure momen­tum, leap­ing in each time you think the chord just has to change. It’s the kind of song you want to lis­ten to whilst cut­ting down the street on a sunny Sun­day after­noon with not much on your mind, maybe on your way out to get some brunch, prefer­ably on repeat.

“My Imag­i­na­tion” is more com­plex, with more sec­tions and more of those fan­tas­tic bass lines climb­ing all over the place like kids on a jun­gle gym. The song itself is great, catchy, full of motion, but even more than that there are the end­less tiny touches of idio­syn­crasy, the kind of thing that makes albums like, say, Pet Sounds so amaz­ing and per­ma­nently lis­ten­able. The way the bass doesn’t seri­ously enter until that ballsy fill around 11 sec­onds; the afore­men­tioned ooh la la las, the way that every drum break on that minor chord comes back not on the one but a half beat early, the con­stant shift­ing of drum feels, the mod­u­la­tions and mod­u­la­tions of the bridge ris­ing all the way into the tri­umphant falsetto, the drum fill at 2:15, the call and response of the har­mony vocals just after that (“not tough”), the phasered “my my my imag­i­na­tion” over the end­ing. There is so much in these songs. I could keep going, too, though for prac­ti­cal rea­sons (read: bore­dom) I will spare you.

The great thing, for you, for me, for the Spirit Kid, is that these songs are A) so intox­i­cat­ingly enjoy­able that it takes no effort what­so­ever to just nod your head and think yes and B) so well arranged and inter­est­ingly built that you can sit here and write, oh, I dunno, 1259 words on them and there will still be more and more and more to say. It’s a shame it looks like the album’s going to be com­ing out in the win­ter, because it really deserves to be the sound­track to your next sum­mer. Those of you in New Zealand take note.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — You Lit Up For Me Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — My Imagination Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]