Any band or artist sitting at home and wishing for success — and there are a lot of those, aren't there? — would do well to heed the cautionary tale of the Spin Doctors. I can think of few bands in recent memory who were hit harder by success than this group. They never pretended to be anything more than what they are — a rock band with jammy tendencies and a gift for pop hooks — and yet the first few years of their career saw them rocketing to insane highs and plummeting to horrific lows. It's enough to give a group of scruffy goofs the bends, which is pretty much what happened here; even before 1999's Here Comes the Bride was recorded, most of the band had split, and before the two remaining members could do much to promote the album, vocalist Chris Barron was stricken with vocal paralysis.
Like I said, hit hard by success.
I worked briefly in a used CD shop in 1996, and during my time there, I was continually amazed at the number of used copies of the Spin Doctors' second album, Turn it Upside Down. It was basically a watered-down replica of the band's bajillion-selling debut, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and deserved to be a commercial disappointment, but damn. In the space of two years, people went from clamoring for "Two Princes" on the radio all the fucking time to full-on hating the Spin Doctors. Neither reaction makes sense to me.
Anyway, the original lineup got back together a few years ago, and Nice Talking to Me is the result. It sounds like a Spin Doctors album, which is no big surprise; even Bride sounded pretty much like everything else they'd done before. It's actually more consistent than their other albums — their jammy tendencies often seemed to be at war with their pop side before. I suppose their hardcore fans really enjoy the freestyle stuff, but really, it takes a pretty special band to keep a ten-minute song from dissolving into a big puddle of wank, and the Spin Doctors is not one of those bands. They're best when they stick to the lightweight pop stuff, and that's what they do here, for the most part. The lone exception is "Can't Kick the Habit," an endless (8:16!), hookless, pointless ballad that starts out nowhere and never gets anyplace else. The album's first single, inexplicably, is a four-minute edit of "Habit."
Article comments
1 - Matt
This has been syndicated to Advance.net, a place affiliated with about 10 newspapers around the country.
Also please let your contact know, if you had one, that this article, is published at another place.
Thank you.
Matt Freelove
2 - Lono
Pocketfull is a great disc. I have it, but kinda sensed they were one trick pony's. That, and radio completely killed the band (and the band didn't help themselves) by incessantly playing 'Little Miss Can't be Wrong'.