Springworks surprises us with a different mood and sound palette for “Ultraviolet Lullabies.” It’s structured around an ascending chord structure that feels like it keeps climbing upward throughout the song even though it starts the cycle over. It sounds like theme music for a science fiction series set on frontier world that is settled enough to have some culture and political intrigue. The melodies and arrangements are like a psychedelic garage folk song but with a retro-futurist feel like some late 60s band writing music for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Watch the video for “Ultraviolet Lullabies” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.
Canadian duo Springworks in their usual fashion pair vintage footage and film clips with their increasingly eclectic songwriting as manifested on “Bradbury.” It’s a fond look back at a time when things like going to Mars felt like something that might be a scientific and civilizational achievement for humanity broadly and not a narcissistic, oligarchic power/money grab at the expense of everyone else and everything on earth. Yet the way Springworks composes its layers of sound it’s obvious they’re aware of how even with the best of intentions, our species has a habit of doing perhaps unintentional damage or damage in service to prevailing political and economic ideologies. The piano work flows from melancholic to urgent, guitar provides atmospheric swells, synth a touch of tonal coloring and minimal percussion a textured pacing to the song. It’s lo-fi in a way that fits the aesthetic of repurposing the neglected and forgotten. The keyboard melody later in the song sounds like something out of a Procol Harum song before transforming into a sparkling, cycling shimmer of a sound that fades into an outro that is both abstract and intimate as we see images of a landing craft leave the spacecraft and the worried alien beings there to meet them. They can hardly be blamed. We know how humans can be. The science fiction author invoked in the title had his doubts too. Watch the video for “Bradbury” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links below.
There is a vividness to the production on Springworks’ latest single “Snake Oil Salesman.” It’s a nice touch for a song about the kind of people who try to fool people into believing in something that is patently untrue but profitable for the person peddling misleading claims. We see this all the time in politics, in the way our economic systems are run and the ways in which people have been tricked into a way of living that involves constantly having to market yourself for clout because there are social incentives for building clout even if it really amounts to very little. Musically the song is like a weird mix of garage rock and New Wave with some buzzy guitar work and atmospheric vocals in the chorus. But underlying the music are currents of Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” and a deft allusion to Pete Shelley’s 1981 hit “Homosapien.” The scratchy guitar riff that runs throughout sounds like a sound effect for a frazzled end wire that is sparking on and off electricity like the way electronic signals in binary fashion communicate but in the song it has the effect of embodying a disconnect with oneself and the world around you yet it has its own catchy appeal like the touch of psychedelic melody that is at the core of the song. Overall it’s a layered commentary on how we have come to accept the dynamic of being lied to and the incredibly pervasive presence of marketing culture on all levels of actual culture while also playfully suggesting we can unplug from that way of being and to pull back the curtain on the charlatans that plague us. The title alone highlights how what can seem new now in society has in fact been a part of public life since as long as we can remember with figures of speech that capture the phenomenon perfectly. Watch the video for “Snake Oil Salesman” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links below.
Springworks takes a bit of a turn toward the retrofuturistic with “Faraday Eyes.” It’s a song about the ways sophisticated technology can at first seem like a convenience before it can become obviously a tool of control. When too much is in the control of a central authority or a corporation or two it becomes too easy to systematize oppression in a coordinated way that potentially affects all areas of life with network effects. Technology reporters including Corey Doctorow have reported extensively on aspects of how big tech through monopoly and monopsony have impacted so much of our daily lives and aim to stretch further at first to seem like a convenient boon but locking everyone into an economic pathway that isn’t necessarily in everyone’s best interest unless you’re the company profiting. The song itself and the music video make use of vintage yesteryear technology imagery to make this point, including referencing the godfather of electromagnetic science Michael Faraday in the title, with playful creativity and with sounds that one would normally hear in a more vintage psychedelic rock or pop song to comment on a modern problem with the aesthetics of a previous era. But this time the band sounds like its channeling 90s Britpop and psych garage at once into a modern New Wave and post-punk fusion, an apt sound for a song examining complex modern issues from a different angle. Watch the video for “Faraday Eyes” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.
Recriminations and spite run through Springworks’ lates single “We Are Not Amused.” The band regularly finds old industrial film footage, commercials and public domain reels in crafting the music videos to accompany its songs and for this it looks like a family conflict and one more in the workplace while women dance for some television show from the 60s that would play popular music like Hullaballoo or Shindig! The song is a lo-fi power pop number akin to a bubblegum pop band of that late 60s era but the lyrics relate what sounds like a serious conflict of some sort that was challenging to resolve in which both parties probably won’t see eye to eye and get some mutually agreeable resolution. And that happens in life and you have to find some way to process those feelings. The line “The steam-uh/Evaporating into/Pistons/To make it up that hill/And this song/Replacing urge to kill” outlines a path to transmuting rage into something productive which, unfortunately, doesn’t happen enough in the world. But in the distorted guitar crunch and buoyant melodies of this song there’s something that honors the anger while putting that energy to use and make something out of it you’d rather have in the world and maybe someone will hear it and pull back from the precipice just a little. Watch the video for “We Are Not Amused” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.
Springworks paired a collage of old educational videos with a song that sounds like it was written in another era in crafting “Rest Stop Painter.” The song is about images we might run into in passing in traveling in our youth or adulthood that resonate strongly with us for whatever reasons might anchor those visuals in our memory. Maybe it’s a bit of architecture, or a work of public art or merely a setting that in whatever alchemy of happenstance forms a picture that stays with you. It is these sorts of memories whether visual, in sound or through other senses that help to form our cognitive framework and the ways in which we respond to the world around us. These are the points of stimuli that are the anchors to the flow of information that makes up reality as we know it. The song itself is somewhere betwixt lo-fi psychedelic folk and outsider indiepop with minimal percussion, what sounds like melodica, synth, gently processed guitar and spare yet expressive vocals that clearly have a touch of production on them as well. And there is a quality to the song that sounds familiar and as mentioned before it has an aspect that is reminiscent of an earlier period in pop music development precisely because the lo-fi aesthetic is so well executed it draws across decades with stylistic touchstones much like the imagery in the video and the lyrics that anchor the song in the lived experience of being drawn to the points of memory that endure with us the most. Watch the video for “Rest Stop Painter” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.
The impetus behind the writing of Springworks’ song “Joke of the Season” was the feeling of hearing a lot of uniformity in in music, probably popular music, and how a stylistic trend of production method will run through a huge swath of music or really form of art for awhile. In the 2010s too many years meant yet another “garage rock” band that sounded like everything else on Burger Records or a “psych rock” group that wasn’t particularly genuinely psychedelic or really even trippy but just had a little reverb or delay on the guitar and vocals to thicken the tone and give it a little atmosphere. Just prior to that the whole chamber pop thing or indie Americana. If you listened to a radio station touting the indie music format you might very well listen to a half hour of music and not know it was a different band from different decades. The title refers to a joke told too often, or really any trick or rote creative choice or habit repeated to the point of being stale rather than reliable.
So did Springworks succeed in bursting past a popular trend of today or at least burst through an instinct to repeat a successful formula? When the song begins it’s not unlike a good psychedelic pop song with some resonance for psychedelic music of the 60s but around the halfway point the song shifts into a piano driven section with samples for a half minute a so before returning to the musical themes of the beginning of the song. But the chorus of “We are the joke of the season” in the outro gives us a clue as to the conclusions reached in writing the song. It’s like what Thirteenth Century Zen master Dōgen wrote “Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.” It seems Springworks in undertaking challenging their own internalized creative complacency that seems to have infected too much of popular music discovered that some principles of songwriting work for a reason bur that in “Joke of the Season” the innovation comes in the structure of the song and the reworking of the placement of lyrics and not getting stuck in stale habits yet not rejecting completely what you do well. Is that indeed the titular realization? A perennial desire to revolutionize your creative aesthetic only to conclude that you can only be you but you can reconnect and reconfigure your methods and mode of expression. And to be fair does Springworks sound like a band in a worn out popular style? No. “Joke of the Season” is effective in the way Springworks has always deconstructed lo-fi psychedelic pop, the band just found a new way to give it a fresh approach. Listen to the song on Spotify and follow the band at the links below.
Springworks dropped on us “Catastrophe Just,” a song that sounds like it was assembled from a sped up sample of a 1980s New Wave pop song, perhaps something from the Flying Nun imprint due to the slightly outre melody and rhythm, taped from the radio dropped into a field recording of a busy restaurant from the perspective of the dish pit lending a unique, almost pointillist texture and percussive element that was never meant to be used that way but somehow also works so that the rhythm of that and the melodic sample synergize to create something new and truly unusual yet undeniably accessible. That it ends on the sounds of people talking from a crowded room gives it a haunted quality as well but without the spookiness. Not much like it and though lo-fi the concept is not, rather it’s arrangement taps into that sonic resonance to mutually recontextualize and create something that isn’t hypnogogic pop or experimental post-punk or anything like that but its own hybrid style which we don’t hear nearly enough. Listen to “Catastrophe Just” on Spotify and follow Springworks at the links below.
If Anne Dudley relaunched The Art of Noise as an IDM project, it might sound like what Springworks has done with “Nigerian Slum.” It sounds like it brought in samples from toy instruments and vintage, eccentric synth sounds to make the slinky bass line. But then the song shifts into an unusual retro psychedelic pop song with twin vocals that seem to weave in and out of the spectral keyboard work and sleigh bell-esque percussion. In trading off the lines syncopated the way they are it’s reminiscent of The Happy Mondays had that group of yobs went the route of indie pop but bringing in an echoing saxophone to trace the drawn out paces. It’s the kind of song that should have been a hit in the logical third generation in the wake of Madchester had it more fully absorbed the influence of late 80s Cabaret Voltaire. Truly a psychedelic pop song following the songwriters’ most experimental instincts in expanding what can constitute the accessible. Watch the video for “Nigerian Slum” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links below.
Springworks pairs well the song “Pulsar” with an unusual and imaginative music video. The song is reminiscent of some particularly ebullient pop tune from the 90s era of the Elephant 6 collective. A breezy pace, upbeat rhythms that sweep you along while a hypnotic shifting keyboard sequence running through the song keeps things colorful. The vocal harmonies are subtle and sweet while conveying a message of encouragement not to let your anxieties, perhaps it’s a message to the songwriters too, and momentary fears overwhelm your ability to look up and look forward. Because sometimes we really need someone, mostly ourselves, to nudge us over the hill of emotional resistance to doing the things we want to do but for some reason have lost the momentum to get going. The video includes what looks like old medical school or public programming footage of heart surgery, nothing too dire, just interesting, some 1950s travel documentary reels and all interspersed with images of the celestial objects per the song title illustrating where to keep your attention and of course a pular appears to pump light like a heart does blood making the visual metaphor more clever and obvious than one might expect. A particularly nice detail in the video is after the line about how one should “let the monkeys fly off your back” there is a bit of a film of a chimpanzee rapidly striking a xylophone. The song is like a regular chain of musical and visual Easter eggs for the attentive listener/viewer. Watch the video for “Pulsar” on YouTube and connect with Springworks at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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