As the gentle, soulful pop of Stirred Up drifts effortlessly into the funky shuffle of Weightless, you realise that Spin So Long isn’t just your run of the mill album. But we knew that anyway, Dick Aven has always been an expert in splicing whichever sonic threads he chooses together into music which is fresh and fun, groovesome and graceful and yet is blessed with an old soul. You might recognise the musical building blocks but the sonic architecture that he builds out of them is something else.
Under Her Stars has a hint of late-era Beatles about it, Deacon Bones is sassy and soulful, Unglued is slow and sensual and Aging In Place is spacious and subdued.
Dick Aven in general, and Spin So Long, in particular, falls into that area of music that defies generic categorisation. Not because he is pushing hard to find new territory to break but because he knows that the hard work has already been done and all he has to do is take the sounds and styles that have gone before and find new ways of piecing them together. Something he is an expert at.
He’s tilling the same musical soil as everyone else yet somehow manages to give rise to new and exotic sonic plants. It’s the acoustic equivalent of having “green fingers,” I guess. And if this analogy can be pushed even further, then you can see Spin So Long is the perfect bouquet of music.
