Dundee's Spare Snare have been releasing records, touring and playing sessions for the best part of thirty years without coming to my attention. This changed this week with the release of Sounds Recorded by Steve Albini, which remarkably is just that, a collection of songs that span their entire career re-recorded with the great man.
And it's a quite wonderful album, showcasing what I, and surely countless others, have been missing for all these years. Sounding most to me like a Caledonian Pere Ubu, (synthy hum a distinctive characteristic of both bands' sound), they have a deft feel for both art and rock. Each song sets off with a calm assurance and guile won through years of playing together. They sound like a band that might have featured in David Keenan's This is Memorial Device, that wonderful novel of last year cataloguing the drive that fires young people to form bands that are never likely to sell many records.
This is probably still the case for Spare Snare. Voted the 46th best Scottish band of all time and having placed 32nd in John Peel's 1995 Festive Fifty with Bug, (probably their best known song, it closes the record here). They're probably destined to be a footnote at best in the scheme of things. But this takes nothing away from them in any respect. On this evidence they're quite superb!
'We don't do interaction. We don't do fashion trips. We can't do drum and bass. We don't do middle eights. We are The Snare.' So sings Jan Burnett on We are The Snare a song that pretty much acts as a mission statement. But Spare Snare are not a band that should be denigrated for what they failed to do but celebrated for what they evidently do so very well. Sounds Recorded by Steve Albini, is a documentation of a career spent operating largely under the radar, and why that can be time very well spent indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment