1995 Dallas Observer Music Awards (Part I)

"I don't like talking about stuff," she told the Observer last June. "I just don't like thinking about a lot of things."

And yet she is also one of the sweetest women in town, and one of the most well-read. If her lyrics, both as a solo artist and with her band 39 Powers, reveal a clarity and literacy most bands never attempt even to strive for, it's only because she devours words by the page; each day, it seems, she has begun or finished some new book, and she is always on the prowl for something that will interest her.

Then there is the not-so-small matter of her voice--that surprisingly sweet, beautifully low, indelibly pure voice. Even now, several years after she began performing around town as a solo artist, singing only with the accompaniment of her bass, it still seems like a shock for most people to discover that that voice comes from that package. Her take on Cheap Trick's "The Flame"--originally from the long out-of-print 1991 local cassette Heaven on a Stick, now available on the Observer's CD--remains one of the greatest, most startling moments in local music of the past decade: in four minutes flat, she renders the sugary pop staple into a tortured, melancholy, desperate lament.

"Part of the power of that song," one local musician has said, "is the fact you couldn't believe she could sing like that."

Spyche, hardly forthcoming with facts about her life, will say she did begin her musical career performing in the Washington, D.C. bands Press Mob (which she calls "jazz-thrash") and Parasite (a metal band in which she only played bass). She moved to Dallas in 1991 on "intuition," then began performing as a solo acoustic act, though she absolutely loathed climbing on the stage and baring her soul without the safety net of other musicians surrounding her.

"Back then, I would get up and sometimes shake so badly I couldn't play," she said. "If I made a mistake, I forgot what I was doing. When I started, I really couldn't play well, and I would fuck up all the time...Solo, everything goes away and there's nothing to lean on. Every time I played solo it was because someone twisted my arm and talked me into it after hours."

After a year-long stint in Rumble, playing bass and singing only Prince's "The Beautiful Ones," she formed 39 Powers with bassist Mike Daane, ex-Shallow Reign drummer Brad Robertson, and Buena Vistas guitarist Greg Prickett. The shy, nervous performer of a few years ago has given way to a bona fide frontwoman, one who commands a stage filled with rocker boys (though she stopped performing solo for a while, concentrating instead on the band, she has begun playing around town with an acoustic guitar, which could account for her confidence). When she ambles up to the mike to belt out a song like "Four Corners" or to croon the lovely "Blue," she does so with an almost touching sincerity--as though she has to do this, and not just because she wants to.

--R.W.

AVANT-GARDE/EXPERIMENTAL
Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks

I'd been raving to my wife about Denton's own Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks for a good month or so before she finally got to hear the group in concert. After four harmonically complex, brass-heavy numbers that veered stylistically between waltz, samba, peppy pop, and slow ballad mode--nudged along by lead singer and chief songwriter Little Jack's reedy, vaguely haunting voice--they launched into a galloping, messy, borderline-hysterical version of "America" from the Broadway musical West Side Story. As they chirped and bleated and pounded and howled their way through it, Little Jack kept time by smacking two small cymbals together with the demonic zeal of a grinning, wind-up toy monkey and gyrating his torso as if trying to dislodge a vexing knot in his spinal column. "You know," my wife said incredulously, "if you sit back and think about this band, there's really no reason why it should work."

Which probably gets as close as possible to summarizing the appeal of this cabaret-inflected pop ensemble. They're sublime and ridiculous, loony and tragic, cheerful and perverse, but they're never less than convincing. And nothing they do feels false or predictable. No matter how much you've heard about them--or for that matter, how often you've heard them, in person or on CD--Little Jack Melody never stops surprising and delighting you. You can drop names like Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Nelson Riddle, Kurt Weill, Leonard and Elmer Bernstein, Nino Rota, and Carl Stalling, and keep adding to the list until your musical memory runs dry. But in the long run, it's probably best to forget about analyzing the group's musical influences, because Little Jack Melody is kin to the chimera and the platypus: it belongs to no single classification, yet if you look closely, you can spot bits of mammal, reptile, fish, and fowl--maybe some vegetable and mineral, too.

But what makes them compelling, as opposed to merely interesting, is their willingness to push past cleverness, self-consciousness, and pop culture gamesmanship and plug into genuine emotion. The key is their crafty use of narrative voice, which shifts between tricky and simple, deceptive and straightforward, depending on the song's intent. The Doug Frantz co-written "On The Blank Generation," the title single of their first album, would be just another screed about the materialistic wasteland of the go-go '80s if it wasn't told through the voice of a speaker who betrayed no hint that his appalling selfishness was anything less than completely justified--and by the time that Spielbergean choir of sweet little boys chimes in near the finale, the song is transformed from a cautionary sick joke into an infuriating call to arms.