Imagine Ennio Morricone as a rock band? We’re sold on Spindrift. By Shaun Brady
There’s a chicken and egg conundrum to the psych-cinematic songs of L.A. band Spindrift. Which comes first—the soundtrack or the movie?
In the case of the band’s own 2008 feature, The Legend of God’s Gun, the answer is “both.” A grungy homage to spaghetti westerns, the film began life as a concept hatched by Spindrift songwriter/frontman Kirpatrick Thomas, which he fleshed out into an Ennio Morricone-flavored score. The band then hooked up with filmmaker Mike Bruce, who turned the tale of outlaws, vengeance and adultery into a messy exploitation oater full of gore and overlaid with so many scratches, burns and skipped frames that it looks like it served time as a floor covering in a 42nd Street grindhouse. The preexisting music was retrofitted to the now-existing film for which it was intended, then reconfigured once more for the ensuing soundtrack album.
“So, you’re looking at three different versions of the soundtrack for one movie,” Thomas says. “Before, during and after.”
Thomas got ahead of himself again in titling Spindrift’s latest album, Classic Soundtracks, Vol.1, which consists of 14 themes to films in various stages of realization at the time of their writing and recording. IFC.com has since premiered film clips, trailers and videos by eight different directors to accompany each tune. “It’s a musical résumé for film works,” Thomas says of the album, “a vehicle for us to showcase the kind of thing we like to feel that we excel at.”
When Spindrift formed in 1992 in the very non-western town of Newark, DE, it was as a psychedelically tinged shoegaze/space-rock unit, though occasional instrumentals laced with 007 accents and lysergic surf outbursts pointed the way towards their eventual direction. But it was Thomas’ 2002 trek to the country’s film capital (which he says was “kind of like moving into a candy store”) that cemented the band’s Morricone-esque reorientation.
“My trip to the west coast from the east coast driving through the desert was the initial point of inspiration for me,” Thomas explains. “Seeing the American west and its vast landscapes. Since then, it’s basically been a progression of interest in film scoring and taking things outside of the normal rock and roll band ethic.”
There is a ghost town twang that runs throughout Classic Soundtracks, though the conjured genres range from the go-go sci-fi of “Space Vixens” to the samurai aftermath of “Japexico.” But it’s the dusty, baroque soundscapes of Sergio Leone’s uncanny westerns that are the strongest influence, whether in the tense clangor of “Legend of the Widower Colby Wallace” or the gothic high noon sweep of “Showdown.” Thomas cites influences as disparate as Lalo Schifrin’s score for Bullitt, Vangelis’ new age Blade Runner soundtracks and Wendy Carlos’ Moog-classical fusion for A Clockwork Orange.
“Imagine Ennio Morricone as a rock band,” says Noel Lawrence, caretaker of the J.X. Williams Archive, dedicated to promoting the work of a long-forgotten exploitation filmmaker of dubious authenticity. Lawrence enlisted Spindrift to score sequences from two of Williams’ films, Space Vixens (1967, allegedly) and Hollywood Play-Girls (1966, ditto).
“Sometimes you just know you are going to collaborate with someone at first glance,” Lawrence says. “I met the band’s founder K.P. at a house party in Silver Lake a few years ago. Someone told me his band scored neo-psychedelic soundtracks for weird movies. I knew within two or three seconds of talking with him that his band would be a perfect fit for the films of J.X. Williams.”
Other filmmakers have had similar reactions, which has landed Spindrift on the soundtracks of the Quentin Tarantino-produced Hell Ride and the HBO series Eastbound & Down. Next up are Ward Roberts’ feature Dust Up and Mike Bruce’s follow-up to The Legend of God’s Gun, the gold-hunting adventure Treasure of the Black Jaguar (think Sierra Madre), which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival.
Pieces from nearly all of those projects and others populate Classic Soundtracks, Vol. 1, though Thomas made sure to preserve the album’s listenability by road-testing the material first. “We toured the United States for seven weeks and played the whole album from beginning to end every night,” he says. “We had a lot of different ideas to choose from and this is what finally came to be because it’s the most exciting as a whole record. We didn’t want it to be just another boring soundtrack record. It definitely still has a rock ‘n’ roll element to it, which makes it great to play live.”
