Nancy Kells continues to experiment and explore with their Spartan Jet-Plex project. The Grimalkin Records facilitator and collective member has been beguiling and surprising for a number of years with their unique brand of atmospheric folktronica, what we’ve described in the past as “part digital landscape, part strange dreamworld, a place that ripples at its edges and nothing is quite as it seems.”
The latest Spartan Jet-Plex album, Resurrected, released on Halloween, sees Kells re-animate songs from previous releases. These new and alternate takes feel like a conjuring trick, Kells taking the personal, social and political themes that form the bedrock of their music, and bending them into new, hallucinatory forms. If you’re already familiar with these songs, then the effect is one of a dream-like paradox in which everything feels unrecognised but oddly familiar.
‘Fear’ begins with a grandly somber patience, the overall atmosphere one of a misty midnight graveyard as things begin to story beneath the earth. This feel is exacerbated by the susurrant ‘Clown (Spell)’, wordless vocals gathering like fingers of fog across the leaf-strewn ground. ‘Meant’ is the closest thing the record has to a conventional folk song, stripped back to acoustic guitar and Kells’s vocals, subtly atmospheric synths curling around the foot of the song like tendrils of fog.
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There’s a similar feel on ‘Stop’, the patient and beguiling track that first appeared on Godless Goddess, what I’ve previously called “a hit pop song slowed just slightly, giving it a before unheard dreamy majesty.” The swirling haze of the original is cut entirely, replaced by gentle guitar, but the emotion of the track is somehow concentrated, Kells sounding purposeful and confident in the simplified setting.
Resurrected has two brand new tracks too. ‘Material’ is perhaps my favourite, electrified with sharp jags of guitar that illuminate the song stark and white like forks of lightning, Kells’s voice skating above like wisps of cloud. The other new one is ‘Parallel’, which begins in disorientating vocal loops before switching into crunchy lo-fi folk. Both songs hint at another side to Spartan Jet-Plex, dark and magnetic folk rock in the vein of Jason Molina or Neil Young.
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Resurrected is out now and you can get it on LP, cassette or download from the Spartan Jet-Plex Bandcamp page.
