Now Playing: SPC ECO “FRI-20-2020”

SPC ECO “FRI-20-2020”

Note: I wrote what follows on August 11, 2020, as a Facebook post.

Part of the point of this blog is to preserve some of my writing in a place that is wholly mine, so I am reprinting it here as I recently rediscovered this gem.

Surprise, I’m probably going to be long-winded on this one.

There are many seminal bands that helped form not only my musical tastes during my teenage years, many of them I am sure are of no surprise to anyone that knows me or has read any of musical opinions. At the top of that list is Depeche Mode (of course), followed by INXS, and then from there the ranking becomes less clear, with bands like Front 242 and Massive Attack placing somewhere in the top 10.

Included amongst them is a band that simply has to be on any Gen X radar: Curve.

I could go on and on about Curve, but that’s not what this is about. If you know Curve, then yeah, you already know. If you don’t, just know that they did something different. They were shoegaze and electronic and droning and electric and chill as fuck and also balls to the wall rock.

They were everything, until they were nothing.

They’ve been gone almost 20 years now and I still miss them. Every 3-4 years or so there’s a rumor that Dean and Toni are going to reconnect and do something new, but because of “reasons” they just don’t.

But Dean Garcia has never stopped making music.

One of the many musical projects he created was SPC ECO (pronounced “Space Echo”), formed with his daughter, Rose Berlin, in 2007, soon after the embers of Curve had cooled and she was still a teenager. I’ve been aware of them since almost their formation. I remember checking them out at the time and thinking they just were not for me.

Fast forward 13 years to Bandcamp Friday for June. I stumbled across SPC ECO again, already assuming that I am not going to love what I hear only to find that my supposition is wrong. Is it because Rose is older and in more control of her voice? I honestly don’t know. But this time something clicked.

Again, this is not Curve, but it’s the nu-gaze, Curve-iest that a band can be without actually being Curve.

I was hooked, of course. If I couldn’t have Curve I could at least have this.

Since then I’ve been checking out more and more of their releases, impressed with their self-imposed quota to release at least a track, if not an EP, or maybe even an LP, during every month of 2020. I started with their June LP, followed that up with their July EP and started working backwards.

That’s why though it’s August, I only just discovered their March release, “FRI-20-2020.”

Though it starts with a clanging bell and a machine gun retort, the thumping, consistent beat keeps time until Rose’s voice enters the mix, not as lyrics, but as another sound, an instrument. It’s ironic that what brought me to SPC ECO was how close their June LP hewed to Curve, but this single track from March, though dreamy and layered, lacks the fuzz and distortion that one would expect of shoegaze/nu-gaze. You can see how they got there, but this is the musical equivalent of an opium cloud. This is trip-hop at its finest, but it fits them. It’s simple without being simplistic. In short, it just works.

Oftentimes within music artists try to capture a feeling, often love or hate, the spectrum ends of emotion, but there’s rich territory in-between to be mined and explored. I don’t know if there’s a single word for it, but here SPC ECO captures the essence of being chilled the fuck out.

And honestly, in our COVID-19 anxiety world, it may be exactly what we need right now.

Originally written and published on Facebook in August of 2020