Kitner: Shake The Spins
Kitner: Shake The Spins
Relief Map Records 10/1/2022
Kitner’s LP Shake The Spins puts it all up there in big letters and bright lights with the album title. In ten songs, the Boston band tells the story of life lived at the tail end of a boozy buzz, with another night of debauchery on the way as sure as the sun will set. On balance though Kitner focuses more on the melancholy that lingers after the high high subsides, rather than the high itself.
The hard-drinking conceit imports its own ready-made emotional and psychological backdrop that knots together creative threads drawn together from various quarters of the tippler universe. You’ve got The Replacements, blowing up their own gigs. You’ve got Jackson Pollock, bombing his own gallery shows. You’ve got Henry Miller, who wasn’t a record-setting imbiber, but certainly quaffed his share as he thumbed his nose at the literary establishment. On Shake The Spins, Kitner apprentices in a long tradition of artists who were equally fascinated with both the constructive and destructive impulses animating the creative spirit.
“Hi-Fi Times” is not a song – it’s a 64-second mood setting instrumental that combines the anticipation of The Ronettes' reverbed drum (before the piano kicks in) on “Be My Baby” with a martial rhythm and a rising theme. Why include this sort of introduction at the head of a string of pop songs?
In our “playlist”-dominated present, you hear less of these types of introductions. They harken back to the days of the “full-album” concept, which itself derived from classical forms of composition that used preludes and the like to preview the main themes of the work. For example, a 5-hour Wagner opera will tell its entire story in the first ten minutes of the prelude, spelling out the musical motifs that will come into conflict and seek resolution for the rest of the night. In other words, to include a standalone introduction on a pop album in 2022 indicates the artist wants to be taken a little more seriously than a drive-by listen on an algorithmically-generated playlist. Kitner, your wish is granted.
“Hi-Fi Times” leads directly into “Suddenly,” which listens like a standalone single, and kicks the album into its proper starting position. In digital format, the songs are distinguished as separate tracks, though one flows into the other without pause. You can imagine that the pair of songs are treated as a unit in live performance.
But in its recorded version, the transition between the pair of tracks is an example of an album begging to be played as a vinyl record, or even a cassette tape. Digital streaming and CDs will interject a dead space between the tracks that kills the vibe. To draw another parallel to classical music, digitally streaming opera is practically impossible to do without pulling your hair out. By dint of necessity, the powers that be have sliced and diced 5-hour operas into smaller chunks to fit shorter attention spans. But the discontinuous play destroys the experience. Imagine listening to the lush swell of a Wagnerian string section broken by a track change. In short, buy Shake The Spins on vinyl.
Extra points to a strong contender for the Most Unwieldy Rhyme of 2022 from Kitner’s “Suddenly”:
“When all the walls are caving in // like a high school hallucinogen”
If that looks harmless, try speaking or singing it out. First things first, the number of beats in the first half (8) doesn’t pair up with the number of beats in the second half (9). That’s not a problem by itself. The human ear is very forgiving; it elides sonic typos automatically and, if the meaning of the phrase is clear, you would not normally notice the imbalance. But it’s that big, honkin’ 5-syllable word ‘ha-llu-cin-o-gen’ at the end that won’t go quietly into that dark night. The singer has to relocate the natural emphasis from the ‘-llu-’ to…where exactly?
Have a listen and see if you can locate the relocated emphasis. It’s disappeared. Listening to a five-syllable word with no stress or accent makes you feel like you’re hearing the word on acid. To paraphrase “Suddenly”: it all feels wrong! But if Johnny Rotten can rhyme ‘antichrist’ with ‘anarchist’, what isn’t allowed?
In “Bowery” a young drunk is let loose in New York City. There are intimations of romance on the rocks. The protagonist drinks to forget his problems, but the listener gets the impression that the problem might be the drink itself. As Homer Simpson once toasted: “To alcohol! The cause of and the solution to all of life's problems.”
It gets bleak though – the last lyric of the song, as published on their Bandcamp page, sings “No helping hand to be found // Just porcelain and piss.” There’s no “helping hand” except the protagonist’s own manual assist to his member as he evacuates the night’s debauchery into the urinal. A dark pun for a dark moment. And yet, listen to the final chorus. There’s a final verse not included in the published lyrics that runs: “Without you I drown and I sink.” Another voice is faintly heard responding to his call. Is it a saving grace, love to the rescue? Or just the wishful fantasies of a sentimental drunk at the end of his rope?
KitnerDrunken jammers are the main staple of Shake The Spins. Only the time and place change. “Orient Heights” brings a New Year’s twist. “Malden, MA” (shout out to the Malden teachers who went on strike for a new contract and won) flashes a bright harmonica on the refrain that lifts up the mood of the song out of the trenches of down-on-his-luck bummercore.
“Henry Miller ‘91” is a quieter, more introspective tune that takes a step back from the alcohol-fueled bombast described in other songs. The scene here is more domestic, imbued with the sentiment attached to real memories rather than wishful thinking. It’s a wintry day, cold, and the fire burns in the fireplace. The protagonist draws close to the warmth and feels the memory of “brighter days” spent with a lover.
No mention of the esteemed author Henry Miller beyond the song title. But you could imagine it’s one of those odd days in deep winter when it’s too cold to do anything but pull a book off the shelf, get beneath a blanket, and get lost in a world that makes more sense than your own. Not that Miller is always a sunny read – the guy spent a lot of nights on park benches, lived through some brutal divorce scenarios, lost touch with his kids, and watched his wife prostitute herself to pay the rent. But he put a good face on the chaos in words.
“New Haven, CT” starts as a solo acoustic folk rocker before ramping up into a full-band production. It’s a good change of pace, and signals a quieter end than beginning to the album. The closer “If There’s Anything Left” sports shades of Goo Goo Dolls in the picked acoustic guitar motif and the soft-spoken radio-friendly purr. Extra points for the Easter egg ending.
Shake The Spins ends on the same melancholy note that started it all. Ten songs deep, we’ve witnessed a lot of hangovers and no small amount of contrition. You’d think that the protagonists involved had learned their lesson, seen the light, turned over a new leaf of moderation. But that’s the thing about the hard-drinking conceit that Kitner has picked up from tradition. There’s a sense of tragedy, a fate we’re drawn towards that supersedes the choices that our best selves might make on our best days. Whether we’re drawn off course by the siren song of addiction, or just the giddy pleasures of being young and dumb, it’s all the same. There are some mistakes that ask to be made, and you can only say ‘no’ so many times before finding your way to ‘yes’.
“yes I said yes I will Yes.”
