Spirit Plate
NYC’s Brian Russ of Spirit Plate shares with us an exclusive listen to the just released album Youth Moose, available today from Campers Rule Records/Fox Food Records, that features the band leader reflecting on the past 12 years of changes witnessed in his beloved city that celebrates the good, the bad, the meh, with a hopeful mind for what may arrive next. An ambitious tour du force, Youth Moose is the thrill of running about Brooklyn over the course of the past 12 years, vicariously enjoying all the iconic boroughs have to offer.
Brian accompanied by Spirit Plate’s Brad Connolley, Chris Francis, Billy Fidler & David Engelhard get the party started with “All Day Long” that is a day long party that features the group firing off almost every radical rock pop trope they can think of. The situations turns more mystic & mysterious as Russ & company peer through the veils of illusion with “Everything’s a Joke”, that then gets weird with the Manhattan dance party of “Levi, Alert The Crowd”. Musings on desires of instantaneous types of automation & the sort can be heard on the romantic flute loops of “Open Automatic”, right before the group busts out the big-band lounge act style number of “Minor Threats” that blends suave organs & hip horns all throughout a piece delivered by a talented ensemble.
Street scenes are executed with well-timed rhythm sense with “Trash On The Street” that is practically organized as if it was an off-Broadway production. A song devoted to the extents of patience on “It Takes a Long Time” is worthy of being a single unto itself, to the feeling of passing by/and/or perusing the news-stack shelves of a local NYC newsstand kiosk on the rushed feels found on “Daily News Headline”. The band buzzes & fuzzes with all the fun psych-affectation frenzies on the delightful “Milk”, while “Waiting For My Share” continues the waiting game of time that expresses the time it truly takes for progress-in-process to arrive at full fruition. Brian Russ & friends leave us with the title track “Youth Moose” that is a both a send up of the past that holds tight an exquisite hope for the future with sleek guitars, hand-claps, organ key-sustains & all.
Spirit Plate’s own Brian Russ penned the following reflections on the making of Youth Moose via the following exclusive reflections:
I wrote the songs pretty quickly, mostly over one Jersey Shore beach week while everyone in my family was asleep at night. Instead of sitting down with a guitar and a notebook as I usually did in the past, I wanted to focus more on beats and rhythms, so most of the songs started out as drum parts, sequences, or bass lines that I fiddled with. I knew lyrically that I wanted to focus on the themes of Brooklyn changing before my eyes and becoming this new unfamiliar place, different from the one I knew when first moving there 12 years ago. But as I started writing lyrics with that focus, I couldn’t help but tell these little stories of growing up as a kid and coming to terms with being who I was as an artist. And then I got into talking about friends of mine, kind of like how Bruce Springsteen would, or something. So there are glimpses of being the confused teenager with a guitar up to glimpses of being the confused dad of two kids that I am today. There’s the pressure of the political climate surrounding us and all the tensions felt around race, the environment, and the corporate take over of the working class, particularly working artists. These are things I reflect on everyday so they had to end up in the lyrics too. There’s just a lot in there, maybe even too much packaged in, but I worked quickly on the songs, hardly said no to any of my ideas as they came up, and finished those demos that one Jersey Shore week.
After giving the band the demos, I think we all saw the potential of what could be done with the songs. I went around with my phone taking photos of every piece of street art I could find all over the city, kind of as a way to hone in on the true essence of what I wanted to be felt in this record. Then there was a lot of thinking about how it was going to get done, but then when it came time to do it, I basically loaded up all my crappy recording gear into one of those suitcases on wheels, brought it to the rehearsal studio where we practice, set it all up with live mics all around the room, and recorded all six of us playing the songs live. We weren’t able to play back any of the takes to see how they sounded. We couldn’t listen in on headphones to get a better balance of what what happening live. We just went with it, and there was this unspoken feeling of like, we’re getting this record done—no obstacle is going to stop us. We did four long all nighters like this. I took the raw tracks home and with an hour here and an hour there, again when my kids were fast asleep at night, I’d sit at the computer and mix, edit, or overdub, slowly but surely getting it all done over the course of about a year. That’s Youth Moose. In many ways, we can’t even really believe that it happened, but it was so much fun that I’m now looking to record any band that wants to this way. Message me.
Spirit Plate shares with us an exclusive listen to the just released album Youth Moose, available today from Campers Rule Records/Fox Food Records
