By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the loose, gauzy rock of Sprite’s nearly self-titled EP SPRIITE and the tender, intimate cosmic country of Andrew Sa’s debut album AMERICAN ROUGH!
Sprite – SPRIITE EP
Genre: Shoegaze, Slacker Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Off Switch,” “Too Far”
There’s a reason they call Chicago the “Third Coast.” (And this ain’t a geography lesson, either.) It’s because the music emanating from Chi-Town (but especially that of the rock ‘n’ roll variety) is routinely under-defined. It’s weirder and less sentimental than the West Coast, and often more intense and jarring than even stuff from back East. It’s a wonderful third thing—like how RC Cola ain’t just Coke or Pepsi.
Sprite very much champion this uniqueness across their four-song, 11-minute “self-titled” SPRIITE EP. (The fact that the name is just a wee bit off speaks to my larger point.) What the EP might lack in available space, it more than makes up for with this unassuming but potent encapsulation of Sprite and their place as this Third Coast-ian commodity. “Back to the Middle” is like a more neurotic, self-aware Dinosaur Jr., and there’s ample charm as they bash through all that emotional noise. Meanwhile, “Off Switch” embraces more pop-forward hooks, but it never sounds any less delightfully odd. From there, “Past the Root” proves uber-sincere, a gem of poignant interpersonal reflection adorned in all that janky indie noise. Finally, “Too Far” pushes the neurosis-via-rock to its contextual end point, but even that’s a vital and endearing display of self-awareness.
Sprite call their musical output “Slacker Gaze,” and while that’s perfect for their marketing materials, it’s also massively telling. Yes, they’re students of certain musical “truths,” filling this EP with the understated feedback and pained personal insights that have entertained generations. But they also find themselves bounding between their walls, churning between grandiosity and introvertedness, being overwhelmed and close to alright. It’s an EP that’s as much a planted flag of their hometown as it is the flag of their actual residence—this place of huge highs, deep lows, and unwavering emotional honesty. The variations between songs on SPRIITE might not seem all that distinct (even as each song shows the many, undeniable sides of their technical prowess and general collaborative wizardry). Mostly, it’s all proof of the wondrous pocket dimension occupied by Sprite. It’s a land humming with the warmth of ’90s nostalgia even as the band dig anxiously for new angles and perspectives. It’s a realm where they can be free to share the simplest, most profound truths, and dress it up with power chords simply because they can. It’s this bubble where Sprite are in charge and very much out of control, and they bathe in the glow of that uncertainty.
Maybe your “version” of Chicago is much different, but for the handful of years I lived there, Sprite’s world felt just like my own experiences. By both holding on to what matters, and releasing what you can’t control, you can make a space all your own. And the band’s done just that in 10-ish minutes, carving out a sonic corner where rock feels exciting and scary, thrilling but demanding, and affirming but unnerving. In short, exactly the sort of place worth visiting with increasing frequency. Head on over to the Third Coast right now via Bandcamp. [Chris Coplan]
Andrew Sa – AMERICAN ROUGH
Genre: Cosmic Country, Queer Country
Favorite Tracks: “Under You,” “Lavender Cowboy,” “Where It Lands”
“The eye can wander forever / Isn’t love where it lands?”
Andrew Sa and H.C. McEntire’s voices delicately dance with one another. Then they repeat that phrase once more: “Isn’t love where it lands?” On an album filled with warm, tender ballads, each more beautiful in their sparse sonic curiosity than the last, “Where It Lands” radiates as its defining statement. Sa’s debut, AMERICAN ROUGH, is an embodiment of modern queer cosmic country music—it’s a cinematic, settled evolution of a very late ‘50s, early ‘60s countrypolitan sound, and funneled through the likes of pioneers like Lavender County, or more produced voices like k.d. lang or Orville Peck. The aerated vocal harmonies and gentle orchestrations quietly bubble from song to song. The more immediately catchy songs, including the soaring, lonely portraiture “Lavender Cowboy” and the heavenly, sax-assisted sway “Your Whisper,” remain calm and reserved in Sa’s lived-in melancholy. The album’s most rousing moment comes with a chorus of horns on “You Turn Me On,” where Sa’s crooning, halcyon search for a man who reminds him of his past creates a tranquil happiness. It’s a welcome moment seemingly for both us and Sa.
AMERICAN ROUGH is built for mostly empty American Legion halls, not crowded bars or honky tonks, and the still, charming sound he and McEntire produce across the whole album is appropriately spacious and breathtaking. Therein is a duality between the rough and rugged Americanism of the past and blissful, sensitive intimacy of the future we want to create—and how those feelings colliding manifest in modern survival. “You’re fighting to be fighting / At night you kneel down and pray / Like a strike of lightning, you said, ‘Ties only bind us’ / Didn’t Daddy fight the same way?” Sa is fighting with tenderness, and I hope he’s winning. You can listen to the album over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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