Spot
Nae Plumb Nor Square (No Auditions)Spot/Albert
In the Bag!! (No Auditions)Chances are that Spot produced one of your favorite records. As the house engineer for SST Records, the longtime local helmed seminal works by Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, and Hüsker Dü, not to mention the Misfits, the Big Boys, and Ed Hall. These days Spot prefers the role of wayfaring stranger, mining the folk traditions of Old Weird America. Originally released as a tour-only CD-R in 2005, Nae Plumb Nor Square gathers his Celtic stomps with DeLorean Mechanics (the medley “Jigs: Humors of Garlic/Old as the Hills/Ryan’s”) with his rollicking, fiddle-led 1990s outfit Spot Removal (Morricone’s “Good, Bad & Exodus”) and various instrumentals. What Spot lacks in songwriting he makes up for with intensity of performance, as in the bluesy slide guitar original “Dog, Duck, Dildos, Bondage, Toys,” which plants him in the one-man band camp between Ralph White and Possessed by Paul James. Backed by Albert Alfonso on an assortment of percussive instruments (bodhrans, roundron, etc.), In the Bag!! three years later proves an equally mixed sack, including tenor banjo dust-ups (“Farewell to Tequila”) and a 33-second homage to the “Minutemen.” There’s even an electric blues shuffle (“Jig: Hideaway”) that calls to mind Greg Ginn’s Taylor Texas Corrugators. Now if only there was some way to get those two SST pillars to jam together.
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This article appears in January 29 • 2010.