Revessay: My on/off relationship with Spraynard's "Cut and Paste"

I loved Spraynard's first E.P.

I guess, like everyone else, I had a Latterman-sized hole in my eardrums that had to be filled? But you know those Latterman comparisons are just lazy so that's the last you'll hear of that.

I think I started listening to that demo during the January warm-spell of '09... or was it during late fall '08? Don't really remember. I remember trekking out to Cedar House, Sartaj in tow, hoping to catch them at an overcrowded shit show. Mimi had given them two thumbs up after seeing them play Fennario a week earlier. I guess we missed Spray, but thankfully got to see Factors of Four rock the kitchen before dealing awkwardly with a crackhead in some Baltimore Avenue Chinese restaurant. So the first time I saw Spraynard was probably at our house that following spring break... their sets haven't gotten much longer. They played the demo + a Plow cover.

A lot of time passed, from a local music standpoint. The buzz about "Cut and Paste" started, in my ears, mid-fall, when Mimi played me "Jay's Cafe," a C+P track that debuted on the "West Chester Nuclear Winter" compilation that Pat graciously burned and distributed around SEPA. I knew the song was an instant classic, but yeah dude, my interest in Spraynard had definitely waned by that point. I think I probably had some post-Pirouette fear of band commitment. Factors of Four had yet to fail me (well, actually, they were broken up by the summer's end,) but I just felt too tired to get attached to anyone else. And my ambivalence toward Spraynard continued, through downloading C + P, seeing them play my house one or two more times, and the laser tag show...

OK to be honest, I felt like they were stealing my sister away from me. She was going to see them play every weekend like, and was hanging out with them after school and had started a new band with them. I'm that insecure -- that I'm afraid of losing my sister to a really great punk band I had cold feet about.

I mean, how could bands just be so STOKED all of a sudden? I guess I was kind of suspicious. Spraynard were acting as these scene-movers. They started the message board and after that it seemed like there were twice as many bands doing decent stuff and Mimi and I weren't the only kids west of Philly doing house shows with a semblance of regularity. Actually, I was so ambivalent that I have to say it was just Mimi running the shows at our house. I was moping my way through winter and had a bad attitude about everything which didn't help my rep on the boards. Deleted my account after, like, 10 posts. I've always been a sore loser, dude.(1)

Not anymore, though. Two weekends ago, Mimi and Miles picked me up in Wilmington and we drove a few miles north, to Claymont, to see Spraynard play with some typically esoteric (never, ever crossing the Delaware line to play a show, it seems,) DE Bands. I've been talking about this show a lot since because it really put a smile on my face.(2) Spraynard played after a sludgy, redneck(3) metal band and a really skinny hardcore band in front of 10 or 12 people, only 1-3 of which I'm guessing had heard the 'nard disc(4), as this was Delaware and they don't seem to get out much down there.(5) Spraynard, as they say, "brought it." "It" was basement-filling, friendly-energy. Not defensive, like a band less at ease, nor showy, like a group of out of towners that felt a strong need to impress.


Spraynard played the same exact way I'd seen them play five or six times before, but to a completely different audience, with practically the same results. I'm sure if the basement had been two or three times as full, there would have been attempts at pile-ups of smiling peepz screaming along and crowd-surfing. Spraynard's music just CALLS for that kind of reaction. Apparently, it's this way for them all across the country. The dudes seem to have more friends in more places than Verizon has bars. And somehow they treat Mimi and even me, the resident Doubting Scenesnob until that night, like [Pat Graham stretches out arms] "Kin."

Is it the way Dos smiles his way throughout their set behind his drums? Or Mark acknowledging how funny he his while you're hanging out with him before the show because he's seriously making amazing jokes out of every topic of conversation, and his comedic genius becomes this hilarious elephant in the room? Or Pat, somehow sounding as sincere as he probably did the night of their first show, thanking their hosts and the guests and the bands?

This is a fact: these guys know how to give compliments. It's not like some scene-Darwinist fakery: the band that compliments the most will thus get the most fans and the most shows. Just like their music, I've learned that this kindness is totally genuine.

Like, I've been trying to write this joke for awhile. When I first came up with it, I thought it was pure genius. It's not but I'll tell it anyway: "A lot of people have, like, sexual fantasies, but I am more into fantasizing about the scene. Like, in one scenario, I'm hanging out in my bathrobe. And I get a knock on the door. I go to answer the door and there's Spraynard. They come in and they're giving me all these compliments and making me feel good about myself." I guess it's not very good because it's seriously just an iteration of the absolute truth about Spraynard: that this is a good band, made up of good guys.

So lately, instead of putting on C + P out of some obligation I feel toward my sister, I put it on because, in the immortal words of Chumbawamba: it "sings the songs that remind him of the good times/he sings the songs that remind him of the better times." Saying stuff like "friendly-energy," even if it's something that actually existed in that basement, is hard sometimes. During the week, just like every other writer that spends most of their day in front of a backlit screen, I'm burying my angst/stress/fears under layers of ironic distance, arch-humor, and a very-very cautious optimism.(6) However, some truths require me to let my guard down at the risk of sounding over-sincere. Spraynard is like a cocktail on an empty stomach that loosens me up enough to be honest.

For example, I've been kind of ignoring the enormous fact that most of my friends here at school will be abroad next semester, including my girlfriend. I was playing it cool, like "I will make new friends and continue to have fun without you, suckers." But it's the end of term in Spring 2010 and most of these people won't set foot on the campus until January 2011 and we're pretty much saying goodbye til then. A gust of melancholy hit me in between early-afternoon listens of C + P and now I find myself, uhhhhhhhh, near tears between "Clean up your weiner poopie if you want to see Jesus unharmed," and the start of Pat's vocal.

The guitar/bass/drums at the beginning of "Stickin' Together is What Good Waffles Do" is that post-finals, start of summer melancholy encapsulated in a riff, and a lyric like "Even though this place is fucked, we'll pick each other up and do it all again" couldn't be a more accurate depiction of a semester I spent in commuter-hell, hating this college's bureaucracy, leaving myself screwed in mid-May, hoping for redemption this coming summer and fall.

Spraynard seem OK with atoning for past sins in their songs, so I guess I'll do the same when I listen to C + P over the coming months. Whether it's (what will go down in my self-important autobiography as) my Most Morose Winter and all the cynicism and pointless anxiety I had during it(7), any doubts I had about Pat and Ed's(8) ability to bring out the best in my sister(9), skipped classes, plainly not doing as much as I could to let someone know I care, my messy-ass room, and any time I could have chimed in with a crowd shout at a Spraynard show and didn't... this record will at least come close to filling all those holes, I think.

Stray observations:

* The weiner poopie soundbytes never cease to make me laugh. The video those were taken from can be found here.
* One of the catchiest moments on the record (there are many, actually,) is "Str8trpn"'s "Go ahead!"s.
* The guitar at the beginning of "Say What You Want About Jesse..." are straight-up Goo Goo Dolls but, since we're being so honest, that is the opposite of a bad thing.
* C + P's opening and closing tracks reference sunrises and sunsets so I think it's accurate to say that this album is a concept record about Pat's philosophy that the day should actually be 33 hours long. Actually, that's a blatant lie.
* According to an interview I conducted with Pat via heckle (I am very, very funny at shows,) the title "Jay's Cafe" is a reference to their friend and Knifecrime Island resident Jay, who would make the 'nard dudes tea every morning.


Lapsed Catholic Locavore Rating: Divine
The Lapsed Catholic Locavore Rating Scale looks like this: A Mortal Sin, Blasphemous, A Venial Sin, Penitent, Divine and, finally, Sacred. AMS being an absolutely unforgivable and damned record and Sacred being one that will find eternal life.

Footnotes:

1: Always.

2: I think this is the goal. Spraynard's deal, to the uninitiated, is really, at the risk of sounding like a total tool, punk-positive "vibes." I guess the school of punk is posi-core; generally, fast rhythms and lyrics that speak-of and lead-to a positive mental attitude. There are more-core posi bands and then there are the poppier ones, like the aforementioned Latterman (probably the biggest influence on the current crop of positivity-espousing pop punk bands) and my friends Spraynard. That's not to say all the lyrics are positive. This is easily overlooked. Spraynard, for example, have a song written from the perspective of a young sweatshop laborer. Another is sung by a man weighing his regrets and saying his goodbyes. However, they're sung with a force that implies a desire for change in these persons' lives -- to be brought about by a more positive attitude. Other times it seems like Spraynard are playing what I've dubbed posi-core madlibs: lyrics like "these walls are crumbling/we know who we are" are standard posi-fare and the posi-core madlibs thing is meant as a friendly dig. I'm sure they're as aware as anyone that these are regularly occurring images across bands... and I think that's sort of awesome, these commonalities. Like, "all these bands are singing about it with the same conviction and it's winning me over so it must be true."

3: Yo, that doesn't mean they weren't awesome. That band was terrifying and ruled.

4: I actually referred to C + P as their "disc" in conversation with vocalist/guitarist Pat Graham after their show the other night and it elicited a laugh/mock thing I can only assume was WITH me and not AT me, cos unity is also their deal.

5: Again, not a dis. The kids at the show and the bands that played were awesome, maybe even more awesome than the kids in PA. They seem like they work so much harder for a scene down there. Delaware is small but Newark and North Wilmington aren't exactly an easy drive away from/to one another. So I can understand them working hard for what THEY have and not really feeling the need to go anywhere else... yeah.

6: More accurately it's light-cynicism.

7: An anxiety that actually resurfaced Friday night, at a Fennario show which I spent standing towards the back clutching my copy of Infinite Jest in an unfortunate and regretful display of pretension.

8: Factors of Four bassist/Spraynard housemate.

9: W/R/T rock and roll.