The problem with making the most perfect album of all time is simple enough: how do you follow it up? Spider Bags released Shake My Head, the best album of 2012, on Odessa records. But not just the best album of 2012, within its own parameters Shake My Head was the greatest album; with nothing approaching less than greatness on every single track, Dan McGee was given the keys to the city, the city being Memphis, Tennessee as “the only jerk who sticks around” actually left town. When I interviewed Dan around this time mentioned that line as proving while the songs were stories, they were not necessarily Dan’s stories.
As a long, long, long time Spider Bags fan, essentially since inception, I knew this was the one that not just got them to the top but took Odessa records with them and it didn’t happen. There is no explanation, I remain completely baffled as to how the world of pop could ignore this 29 minute work of genius.
Spider bags joined Merge Records for this, their fourth album. Frozen Letter, and it is a great album. Again, not a weak, though a couple of only okay tracks over the 33 minutes of the album. The first five songs are just about everything you could want from McGee: he isn’t aiming for the bleachers, but the doubles and triples have added up over five excellent songs and only with the change of pace “Coffin Car”, is it no longer another greatest album of all time. Not in sound but in timing, in the changing your ear space, it reminds me a little of “Daymare” and “The Moon Is A Schoolgirl” but not as good.
After that the album goes elsewhere: Americana Waltzes, blues rockers and English garage to finish it offand you can split the album right down the middle. The first four (“Summer Of 69” a Golden Boys cover) everything you dreamt it would be, and the next four less focused, more inclined to art rock, less hard more spooky and as the last song “Eyes Of Death” ends the feedback comes in just like the beginning of the album, s if Spider bags have created a self contained world. And they have. Just not their best one.
Grade: B+
