Sprawl, America Is Dying of Wetnurse

In a weird way, I wouldn’t be here without Sprawl. No, I’m not going to spin some sappy-yet-strange story about being conceived while my parents listened to The Man With The Yellow Hat — I’m nowhere near that young, and sadly, my parents are nowhere near that cool — but seriously, I wouldn’t be living in this city if it weren’t for this one particular band.

See, back when I was a Hill Country-dwelling high school kid, my mom dragged my lazy ass down to this little college in Houston. It was (and is) a beautiful campus, with tons of trees and stately-looking buildings, but I was more intrigued by how carefree and strange all the people we saw hanging around seemed to be (“strange” in comparison to the denizens of a mid-sized Army base town in Texas, mind you). I remember laughing out loud as we watched an official-looking guy in a suit lead a crew of prim-and-proper elderly folks through the entrance to the main Quad of the place, just as a trio of guys yelled “Fore!” and started whacking tennis balls from one side of the “U”-shaped area to the other. Kids were crashed out on the grass seemingly at random, just hanging out or with their noses buried in books.

What made the biggest impression, though, was the yearbook in the Admissions Office. While we sat and waited to talk to the Admissions person we were there to see (about whom I remember zero, sorry), I picked up the previous year’s yearbook and flipped through it. Right in the center was a big section devoted to what sure looked like a band, one apparently made up mostly of students. And they looked like a big deal; all the pictures I remember were live shots, either of the guys in the band all sweaty and crazy and smiling or of the crowd going absolutely nuts. The artwork was pretty wild, too — keep in mind that I was a full-on metalhead (dabbling in hip-hop) at the time — all bright colors and psychedelic shit. But most importantly, it was clear that the band was part of the school, and a respected, loved part of it, no less. Simply put: this college had its own fucking band. Wow. And yeah, when we left that day, I’d pretty much decided I wanted to go there.

So there it is — if it weren’t for Sprawl, I might’ve ended up in Miami or El Paso or California or something, instead of coming here way back when and then staying and building a life and all that. I find it kind of fitting, then, that listening to America Is Dying of Wetnurse, the band’s “new” album (which is really a release of stuff they recorded back in the day), feels like cracking open a time capsule of my quasi-misspent youth, ’cause these guys were partly responsible for it. I missed out on the band’s glory days, sadly — although my wife didn’t, being a hardcore fan, which was how we bonded when we first met (see? another way those Sprawl guys manipulated my life…) — so this is actually a fascinating glimpse into what I was only able to glimpse in the short time before the band fell apart and moved on to other things.

I’ll be honest: even after repeated listens, a lot of the tracks on the disc tend to blur together for me. It all merges into one sweaty, dirty-yet-rainbow-colored, half-stoned, tight as hell, murky, bizarre-yet-listenable, badass mashup of ska, funk, punk, reggae, and hip-hop, with odd chunks of spy music, disco, jazz, metal, and klezmer surfacing from time to time, to boot. All the players jump and churn like the pieces of a well-oiled machine, seemingly never missing a beat, always popping up exactly where they’re supposed to be. Swear to God — even when these folks fuck(ed) up, it sounds like they meant to do it. Add to that singer Matt Kelley’s crazed vocals, which find the heretofore-undiscovered sweet spot at the center of the triumvirate of Jay-Z, Bootsy Collins, and David Byrne, and I’m content to just sit back and let the whole damn thing wash over me.

I’ll admit to a preference for the faster stuff — I love “Rubbit,” for one, especially since it’s one of the few tracks I can pick out the intro to when listening in my car (and the funkdafied spy groove and horns beat the heck out of any recent Bond theme I can recall), the funky whacka-chicka guitar in “Shum” blows me away, and the skank-heavy beginning of “Mold/Path of the Righteous Gentile” always gets my head bobbing. But really, that preference doesn’t mean a whole lot when even the speediest tracks on here morph into jazzy/funky jams and vice-versa. Again, to me this works best all as one massive piece of punk-funk-ska mess.

It’s worth mentioning, by the by, that this is primarily a live disc, culled from shows Sprawl played in ’93 and ’94, which makes the tightness and right-on focus all the more jaw-dropping (the only non-live cut, actually, is studio track “Rubbit”). More than anything else, Wetnurse proves once again that the Sprawl crew were the collective heart, soul, and overlord of the whole funk/ska scene that gripped Houston in the mid-’90s. See, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the band, and when I opened the jewel case I was seized with a sudden fear that maybe I’d been wrong — ’94 was a long time ago now, 14 fucking years, and I was a kid still finding his musical legs.

Was that it, then? Had I slipped on the rose-colored headphones when thinking back fondly on the band? Nope. Rather, I find myself feeling once again like I felt the first time I heard these folks, before I really had any clue what music was about — a decade-plus on, and Sprawl still fucking knock me down and leave me wondering where the hell it all came from. Damn shame it had to go back there before too long.