Manos album cover
Manos

The Spinanes

1993
Sub Pop

If The Spinanes made one canny move, it was to pare everything back to the essentials – one guitar, a drum kit, and a voice. They may have been a humble duo from Portland, Oregon, on Manos – Rebecca Gates and Scott Plouf – but they played with a power and breadth of vision that humbled most indie rock quartets. Their songs weren’t genre exercises, either, as Gates wrote elliptically, both when it came to lyrics and chords: her songs held an ambivalence deep in the pit of their gut, though they could be devastatingly moving, as on the slow, measured strides of “Epiphany”. There are great pop songs here, plenty of them, in fact, but also gestures towards much wider listening – soul; torch songs; folk songs recorded in the field.

Jon Dale

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