Brevity, soul and wit: some of the hallmarks of the Spinto Band's latest forthcoming release. Slim & Slender is the Delaware native sextet's self-recorded debut. A succinctly stated 4 song package, this EP serves as a precursor to the self-recorded LP to follow in 2010. The early results were so good and exciting that the band's label, Park The Van Records, wanted to get this collection of tracks out as quickly as possible, opting for 10" vinyl and digital download commercial release options, landing October 6, 2009.

Self recorded in eastern PA, these very well may be some of the The Spinto Band's best stuff yet. Included are a lot of extended instrumental explorations , like the bouncily jubilant cover of "Brazil" from the Terry Gilliam film of the same title. "Brazil has been a long time classic amongst the band," singer/songwriter/guitar-player/production-guru Nick Krill explains. "I first heard it in the film and have overheard Jeff and Tom and others playing the melody on different instruments over the years. The song brings to mind flying high above a city with angel wings sprouting from my back." Their previous full-length, Moonwink, had Spinto's crafty penchant for taking care in carving out space for all sounds in elaborate arrangements, and "Thayer Function", Slim's original instrumental is a sunwinked continuation of this calling card. Krill explained the genesis of this cut: "Back when we used to record in Thomas and Sam's basement, our former band mate, Albert Birney, penned a song called Layer Function. Albery now lives on Thayer Street in Rochester, New York, and Joe made up the riff for what would eventually become Thayer Function during a sing along on Albert's porch while we were on tour last year. The title just popped out and immediately made perfect sense...kind of making a nice reference to our old basement recording days just as we were beginning recording ourselves again almost ten years later."

Continuing work on building out the band's own studio for this return voyage into their self-recording roots, the Spinto Band plans and prepares for what's next. "We are working on that new material in a new studio we have been slowly piecing together over the course of the summer," according to Krill. "Now that we have found a bass clarinet, we are a lot closer to being done. The next step is to figure out how to play the bass clarinet."

ARMS is what happens when the back burner bursts into flame. A one-time side project transformed into a full band, ARMS synthesizes Todd Goldstein’s years of bedroom experimentation and sharpens them into a single bright blade. ARMS’ full-band debut, Summer Skills, explodes the lo-fi pop of 2008’s Kids Aflame into a widescreen epic, telling a fractured tale of love under supernatural circumstances. Sonically generous and emotionally raw, ARMS’ Summer Skills lures listeners like a siren song and then pulls them into the deep.


Todd Goldstein has been writing and recording songs as ARMS since 2004 — although never quite like this. During his years playing guitar in NYC-based indie rockers Harlem Shakes, Todd quietly self-released his own music as ARMS, sneaking home-recording sessions in his rare spare time. Todd’s first album as ARMS – the luminous, ramshackle pop of Kids Aflame – was released on Melodic Records (UK) / Gigantic Music (US) in 2008 to enthusiastic Internet-praise. When Harlem Shakes disbanded in the summer of 2009, Goldstein expanded ARMS into a full band with the addition of Tlacael Esparza on drums, Matty Fasano on bass / vocals and David Harrington on keyboards / electronics. The group immediately began writing the songs that would become Summer Skills, holing up with producer Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells, Cults, Fucked Up) in Stoneback’s Treefort Studios in Brooklyn.


On Summer Skills, ARMS’ former emotional directness is abstracted and expanded into something more ambitious and ambiguous: a keenly observed fictional universe that shows more than it tells. With Stoneback behind the boards, drums pop and shimmer, analog synths cast audible shadows and ambient clouds glow on the horizon, rendering ARMS’ golden guitar pop something both lovelier and more ominous than before. Todd’s unmistakable baritone is the anchor; it swoops and slides into view, veering between vulnerable, seductive and, maybe, a little bit dangerous. The resulting noise calls to mind the atmospheric clarity of British pop experimentalists like Talk Talk or Kate Bush, with a nod to the minimalist melancholy of Red House Painters and the end-over-end urgency of early REM. But ARMS ‘ noise is all their own, taking the no-nonsense bones of tight songcraft and covering them in shining skin.


Amid the life-or-death stakes of Summer Skills, noses drip kerosene, chill winds blow sweet and razor-sharp teeth gleam in the darkness. It’s this terrain of texture and mood, set among the long purple shadows of August afternoons, that underpins the album’s sequence of haunting moments — little nightmares lit with the blurry shine of dreams. With Summer Skills, ARMS manages the elusive trick of weaving these threads into something both lush and beautifully, painfully alive. -- Eli Dvorkin