Spike and the Gandy Dancers is a folk band in the same way that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is a rock band. That is, while each has a foot in a core genre, they also have a foot, many feet actually, in other sounds and styles. While songs like “Sacred Conspiracy” are essentially gentle acoustic folk ballads with the rhythm section adding just the most restrained touches, “Believe,” which follows, is a raw guitar meets dancing Hammond organ foot-on-the-monitor anthem. And it is with these two songs as markers for the album’s sonic spectrum that everything pays out.
“Descending” sits at the heavier end, slow, musically methodical, melodically meaningful, with intriguing banks of ornate vocals called into play as a clever sonic texture sitting between often-raging guitars and Spike’s vocals, a sound which sits in that Dylan-esque place between spoken word and singing.
“Magic Carpet Car” heads off on a psychedelic sojourn, like a late-era Beatles experimenting with lysergic rock sounds as the band’s career clock counts down. “Golden Bird” also has a nostalgic touch about it, emotive singer-songwriter stuff laced with scintillating electric guitar motifs, and the title track plays us out as a brooding rock and roll piece, lyrically defiant, drenched in demented R&B saxophone and a rhythmic drive that feels like you are on a train heading for hell, and the regulator is stuck wide open.
As an album, What You Gonna Be? is accessible and unsecondguessable, full of variety but with a consistent sonic personality; it hops genres and swerves categorisation, is a contemporary thing for sure, but echoes with both nostalgia and the classic sounds of the past. But all this would count for nothing if it weren’t for one thing. The songs are flippin’ fantastic!
