Yeah, The Distillers Are Cool But Spinnerette Were Way Better

When I was about 16, I used to get my hair cut by this New Yorker who worked down the road. Sick of the low commission rates and wages given to her at the salon, she told me I should go to her east London flat next time instead, where I could pay a smaller amount in cash, and she would still get more money. I agreed – less because I liked sticking it to the man and more because I liked snooping in stranger’s flats – and so began the journey that led me to Brody Dalle’s best band: not The Distillers, IMO, but Spinnerette.

For all intents and purposes, my haircut at this person’s flat was a disaster. When I arrived, she informed me that all the electricity had broken, so she had to do it by candlelight instead (there were three flickering tealights). She snipped, snipped, snipped away, not really looking, telling me about this guy she’d been hooking up with recently, and then washed my hair over the side of the bathtub with scorching water like someone’s impatient mum trying to get rid of their kid’s nits. When she saw that I had an iPod, she started scrolling through it and kindly offered to add her music collection to mine while I was there because I’d told her I’d broken my laptop. ‘Aw,’ I thought, ‘I guess this makes up for the fucked up hair that she is charging me £50 for.’ And so, she plugged it in, synced it up and swiftly wiped every single song off my iPod, replacing them all with Spinnerette, because that’s all she had.

And so, for the next few weeks, possibly months, maybe even a year, I could only really listen to Spinnerette while on the move. Spinnerette on the bus. Spinnerette on the tube. Spinnerette while smoking rollies and downing energy drinks while walking to college. They only ever released one self-titled album in 2009 consisting of 13 songs, and thanks to that hairdresser, those 13 songs became the life force from which I was forced to breathe. Perhaps predictably, though, I ended up getting really into that album. The songs were lo-fi, melodic little gems that totally skewed the ice-cutting American punk of Dalle’s previous work, sounding more like trash rock deep cuts from 1997 rather than something you’d hear on a free Kerrang! compilation. Which is why, when The Distillers teased a reunion last week, I couldn’t help but think: sure, that’s great – how about some Spinnerette though?

Spinnerette weren’t exactly an entirely new band – they were part Distillers, part supergroup, because the members consisted of Brody Dalle and Tony Bevilacqua (both ex-Distillers) alongside Jack Irons and Alain Johannes, both of whom had been in a bunch of bands including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eagles of Death Metal and Queens of the Stone Age. The sound, though, wasn’t like what any of them had released before. It was lighter, poppier, but less slick than those bands, with Dalle’s voice bathed in distortion in such a way that her low drawl became another instrument rather than a big, brutal thing in itself, like it had been in the past.

Tied together with syrupy, garage riffs and slow, spaced out drums, each song on Spinnerette sounds a bit like the next, making the whole thing a weirdly concise sonic object – something you’d play from beginning to end, maybe without really paying attention, but being absorbed by it anyway. Whether Dalle’s voice is curling around layers of itself in “Sex Bomb” or she’s snarling into a void of thrashing, circular guitar in “Driving Song” there’s something strangely hypnotic about the album. At one point, halfway through a song called “Distorting a Code”, it starts playing backwards, but it’s hard to even really notice. You know when your eyes unexpectedly fix on something and you can’t look away and you start mindlessly zoning into this window of nothingness? But in a good way? That’s how Spinnerette make me feel.

A lot of people didn’t really like Spinnerette – and in some ways, I can see why. When their album came out, Pitchfork gave it a 2.7 rating and called it a “perplexing project” that was “sadly lifeless”. The videos, of which there are only two, feel like what someone’s mum might make after surprise-divorcing their husband for a teen neighbour and self-publishing a book on tantric sex. The drums don’t sound as thick and fast as The Distillers, making the Spinnerette album feel sludgier, more lowkey, less immediately appealing. And, as with everything Brody Dalle does, the whole thing can feel a bit ‘unironic cowboy boots and devil horns’. But also, that’s part of the fun. The album artwork is of black lace leather underwear. There’s a song called “Rebellious Palpitations.” It’s sleazy and greasy and cartoonish – like something you might hear soundtracking a low-budget cult documentary about Hollywood – and therein lies some of their appeal, if you can stomach that sort of thing.

I saw that aforementioned hairdresser a few years later, walking outside a cafe in Dalston, and I stopped to wave at her from across the street. For a second, I was tempted to approach her and say thanks for that time she wiped my entire music collection and replaced every song with Spinnerette. It had, after all, introduced me to something I am still thinking about and enjoying nearly a decade later. She didn’t wave back though. She actually looked like she’d seen a ghost and marched in the other direction. Still, if you’re reading this, hairdresser who I will not name: thanks for the album.

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