Spartan Jet-Plex is the recording project of Nancy Kells from Virginia, and the latest artist to release an album on the ever-reliable Fox Food Records. The music of Spartan Jet-Plex sort of defies description at least in as much as it doesn’t fall into a convenient niche. Could you really describe her new album, Touch Tone, as folk music? Or bedroom pop? To me it sounds like the product of a singular artistic vision. And I think this is apparent in the delivery, Kells cutting a confident figure, even on the softest, gentlest tracks, exuding an assuredness that I assume only comes when one is content with their artistic output.
From the gentle acoustic opening of ‘This’, with its harmonious cooing background vocals, to the more straightforward singer-songwriter style on ‘Meant’, a solemn guitar and piano song with lyrics dealing with introversion and attempting to shut out the outside world when things go wrong.
“If I meant to go
it was by fear
and you can show
the truth that breaks me down
it closes doors
silent my call”
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Much of the album continues in this vein, songs that are dreamy and quiet and confined, floating along on currents directed confidently by Kells. The title of ‘The Best’ is somewhat deceptive, the track dark and shadowed with gloomy pessimism (“I am falling, in this void / you can’t destroy me, I’m paranoid”), while ‘Run Me Down’ is shifty and shambling with jazzy percussion and ‘No Shame’ sounds like one of Grouper‘s lighter acoustic moments. Kells says the track is about clinging to some kind of spiritualism after her Roman Catholic upbringing, a longing to believe, if not in the God of the New Testament then at least some kind of benevolence in the universe, and, most of all, a place to join our loved ones after our time on earth comes to and end. ‘Try’ overlaps layers of vocals to create something lush and strangely ominous, while ‘Sport’ is something different, the track feeling brighter, quietly and understandably defiant, right from the opening line.
“Its gonna be alright”
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Some songs take a different tack, where it seems that Kells is experimenting with instruments and equipment, trying to find new ways to drill into the deep and rich seams of the emotion her music deals in. This experimentation also reveals another side to her personality and shows that although her music is clearly an outlet for all the bad stuff, it’s also something exciting and fun. Take for example ‘Wild’, with its almost middle eastern vibe, electronic beats joining hand percussion to root Kells’s floaty vocals in place, or ‘Sailing’, which pairs sunbleached beats with audio samples and a ghostly background chorus of looped vocals.
The final track captures the essence of the album and of Kells’s music in general. The way she uses her music like a prism, to refract her personal experiences into beams of all hues and intensities in the hope that others will recognise and find solace in them. As she told Trevor Elkin of Gold Flake Paint in this comprehensive feature, “Life can be amazing and beautiful, but it is often difficult, and it is difficult for everyone. No one goes through life without struggles, pain, hardship or loss…if you are fortunate, you have good people in your life to help you through the bad times. At the same time, no one can really know how you feel or what you are going through, so we are all alone and not alone at the same time.”
“it’s hard to follow
no one’s on track
no tears to wallow
presence be told”
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Touch Tone sees Spartan Jet-Plex sound like everything and nothing. You can trace lineages back to heart-on-sleeve folk, to experimental DIY pop, to grand and sweeping dream pop. But the album sounds quite unlike any of these things. In short, it sounds like Spartan Jet-Plex.
You can buy Touch Tone now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, including on limited edition cassettes with art by Kells herself.
