This week’s Featured Album comes out of Minneapolis and is a mix of jangly pop, dreamy girl group send-ups and ambling, tuneful folk.

‘All The Happy People’ is Spencer McGillicutty’s third album and follows on from one of our favourite albums ‘Games’.

‘Games’ was full of catchy melodies and sixties style three minute pop rockets, ‘All The Happy People’ thankfully follows in this fine tradition.

‘You Haunt Me’, ’1944′ and ‘Up Half The Night’ will instantly grab your ears and give them a damn good shake, in fact so much so that you’ll wish you had a time machine to take this band back to the 1960s with you so you could get your groove on in real authentic style!

Take a listen to some excerpts from the album below and keep your ears open for tracks from the album on The Melody Mine.

Prior to their CD release show tonight at the Triple Rock Social Club the group’s core members Mitchell Johnson (vocals/guitar/keys), Ryan Ruff Smith (vocals/guitar), Brittany Miller (vocals) and Nicole Wilder (vocals) took time out to talk with City Pages about looking backward for artistic inspiration, embracing an innocent lyrical worldview, and their collegiate beginnings.

City Pages: Your sound is obviously strongly redolent of the early ’60s, but so are your songwriting methods. While Mitchell and Ryan write all the words and music it’s often Nicole or Brittany singing lead vocals. This sort of Brill Building approach isn’t exactly in at the present time in indie-rock. What led you to it?

Mitchell Johnson: It’s just more fun writing songs for people that have way better voices than us [laughs]. It’s cool to let go of the typical rock-star ego of “I want to sing everything that I write.” I enoy writing from someone else’s point of view and being able to sort simultaneously express myself and hide behind a different identity or gender. That’s really what Spencer is all about, we all have our different strengths and if somebody is better at singing a song we hand it to them, and if they want to change a lyrics that’s great.

Ryan Smith: From a craft perspective writing a song you’ll know someone else is going to sing provides a a nice shortcut to thinking about point of view in your songwriting. I feel like when I’m singing a song It’s easy for me to know what I’m feeling and then just assume other people will inherently understand it. When I’m writing for a different person I find it forces me to be clearer in a good way.

MJ: Deep down I think we want to be.

RS: [cutting Matt off] Girls! [table erupts in laughter]

MJ: In our dream world it’s like we’re Holland/Dozier/Holland or working in the Brill Building. We love pretending we’re writing hits for other people to sing — even though none of them will be hits [laughs].

CP: While there are a lot of modern acts out there emulating the sounds of early-’60s music they typically don’t replicate its lyrical spirit. There’s always that element of winking irony or purposeful vulgarity thrown in to call out the modernity. By contract these Spencer songs have a real innocent quality to them that’s fairly rare these days.

Nicole Wilder: Mitchell’s kind of a lost boy a little bit, a Peter Pan, so I think that innocence in his songwriting is fairly effortless. Everybody at the table except me writes songs on their own and you can kind of tell what’s going to be in the group based on that innocent tone. When that comes out of us it ends up in Spencer.

RS: I think part of that winking irony is just symptomatic of a different worldview that’s more dominant now in music. The main thing people seem to focus on now is a band’s sound rather than their songs. Fans will be talking about a new band and say “I like their sound” rather than “I love that song.” Putting the songwriting first, and thinking of the sound or style that will support it second, is something that not a lot of people do anymore. There are some people that are still kind of writerly writers like Stephen Merritt but for the most part that’s fallen by the wayside. That’s definitely something we aspire to.

CP: All The Happy People! Is Spencer McGillicutty’s third album but you’re still relatively unknown on the local scene, in part because you gig so sparingly around town. Do you view Spencer McGillicutty primarily as a recording project?

MJ: I’m probably not speaking for everybody but I get a bigger thrill out of making a record I’m proud of than playing live. It’s not a black-and-white thing as it can be fun to play live.

RS: We never saw our main musical heroes live back in the day because we weren’t alive. All they are is the record’s they left behind, so I think we have that mentality a little bit.

CP: Spencer McGillicutty formed when you were all in college nearly a decade ago [in 2004, the guys at Saint John's, the girls at sister school Saint Ben's]. How critical is having that combined personal history when it comes to keeping the band a going concern as other adult priorities encroach?

Brittany Miller: That past history of friendship is really the biggest part of the band. My best college memories are of us sitting together in dorm hallways playing music and hoping we don’t get kicked out by the RAs. We would go on so many midnight walks together around the lakes singing harmonies. I feel like we were able to carry those special feelings of that time all the way through our twenties. I still feel like I’m in college sometimes because of Spencer I feel like I haven’t had to grow up yet. We have to do business-y things sometimes and go to practice when I don’t want to, but whenever I get there I’m reminded it’s a friend thing and how important it is to my happiness.

MJ: We have so many talented friends who are all over the record too and shape the sound. It’s not just us four anymore. Everyone else adds so much and before any of us played any music together we were all good friends. We all lived together in a house for a couple of years up until two years ago and that was a great experience.

Spencer McGillicutty. With Brian Just Band and Paul Spring. 18+, $5 for admission and a copy of All the Happy People!, 8 p.m., Thursday, May 24 at Triple Rock Social Club; 612.333.7399. Click here. 

Read the original article at CityPages.com.

Twin Cities Roll Call: Spencer McGillicutty

Minneapolis’ own Spencer McGillicutty is making their way through the Twin Cities music scene, but they’re big in Japan—no, seriously! To honor this rad path, they will be having a “Japanese edition” CD release party at the Triple Rock Social Club with special guests Kazyak and The Chord and the Fawn.
The immaculate sock-hop-ready ’60s bubblegum pop of local quartet Spencer McGillicutty has inexplicably not generated much buzz here in the Twin Cities as of yet, but they’re big in Japan—no, seriously. Tonight’s Triple Rock Social Club show is a “Japanese” album release party for the band’s sophomore album, “Games,” which is seeing release in the land of the rising sun courtesy of one of the country’s hottest indie labels, Fastcut Records.
Big hooks and a charmingly retro lyrical approach (“That girl kisses boys she doesn’t even know!”) power the albums 13 tracks of hand-clap friendly jangle-pop adorned with the kind of cute touches (dollops of xylophone, brassy blasts of baritone sax) rarely heard since Phil Spector’s heyday. Modern music so steeped in nostalgia is rarely this delightfully irresistible.
(8 p.m., $5, 18+)

Original Article is here
(Click through to second page of the Roll Call)

Spencer McGillicutty/The School

GAMES/LOVELESS UNBELIEVER – (SPENCER HOUSE/ELEFANT/MINTY FRESH) – June 07, 2010

I recently bought the much-analyzed She and Him record on a whim. I like it. I like a lot, actually. It has a great mid- to late-60s AM radio feel and while celebrity singer Zooey Deschanel’s voice is quite tricked up by heavy reverb, it has a nice natural matter-of-fact feel. And really amazing songs. However, the record ultimately makes me miss, Essex Green, who did the same thing a little better and a lot earlier. That’s just a six-sentence way of saying that these two releases — Games, by Spencer McGillicutty and Loveless Unbeliever by School — cut the same path as She and Him. They’re both boppy and light. They could have deftly provided music for Chip’s senior prom on the television show My Three Sons. (That’s a subgenre in search of a label.) Of the two groups, Spencer McGillicutty, of Minneapolis, has a little better songwriting chops — I hear a bit of Carole King in here, mixed with a healthy dose of the brilliant San Francisco band the Corner Laughers. And, gotta say it, there’s a lot of Carpenters going on here. “An Act of Contrition,” the opening track, brings the Karen hard, as does “Telephone Signals.” Beyond that, Spencer McGillicutty rocks out a bit (the utterly catchy “It’s Easy to Fall in Love” and “Secret Best Friend”) and turns in a gem of a tune in the introspective and garage-band-like “Claire Carnaby.” In all, the four-piece outfit (which had help from 18 contributors chiming in on the glockenspiel and French horn, among other instruments), has released a fine record. The School, from Wales, might be a bit more engaging of the two bands, perhaps an assemblage that’s more radio-friendly thanks to the airy production of singer Liz Hunt’s rangy melodies. The entire record is punchy, bouncy, happy, beautiful. “Is He Really Coming Home?” hearkens gorgeously to 1971 AM radio (the trumpets make it sound like the Brooklyn Bridge and Hunt sings like a cooler Melanie). Throughout, the piano and acoustic guitars mesh perfectly in a sort of folk-overeager pop mash up. The highlight: “I Love Everything,” a simple 1-minor 6th-4-5 that’s heartbreaking and gripping at the same time. While I still miss Essex Green, I hope these bands don’t mind being in the same sentence as them. It’s a compliment, one that I hope Deschanel will recognize as unadulterated praise as well.

By: Casey Phillips

Phillips: A bit of (musical) history repeated

While pointing out some of the artists I’d discovered during online forays a few weeks ago, I highlighted “In My Arms Again” by the Minneapolis-based pop band Spencer McGillicutty as one of my favorite new tracks.
A couple of weeks later, Ryan Smith, the band’s guitarist/vocalist e-mailed me to ask if I’d like a copy of their sophomore album, “Games,” to get a broader picture of the band. Never one to turn down free schwag, I agreed.
When it arrived, I was blown away by the band’s brilliantly nouveau take on late ’50s/early ’60s doo-wop. Song after song features pristine vocal harmonies and infectiously orchestrated melodies that would have sounded at home at an “American Bandstand” sock hop. Also, co-lead vocalist Brittany Miller is scarily reminiscent of Carole King, whom I love.
I’m admittedly a fan of brainless electro-pop artists such as Dragonette and Shiny Toy Guns, but I have more respect for bands such as Spencer McGillicutty, who avoid using technological crutches like Auto-Tune.
Bands like that are musical anachronisms. They produce new music that, by dint of evolutionary momentum, should sound completely outmoded. Instead, they’re so completely vested in paying homage that they manage to be simultaneously familiar and fresh, which is simultaneously obnoxious and illogical.
Here are some other examples of musical anachronisms and the styles they revisit:
The Carolina Chocolate Drops (antebellum Piedmont string-band music)
The Darkness (stadium rock/glam metal)
Christabel and The Jons (swing jazz)
Bug GiRL (hard rock)
Justin Townes Earle (Hank Williams-era country)
Listening to these artists, you end up feeling a bit like Marty McFly, since these new releases would probably resonate with your parents or grandparents. Then again, they say fashion is cyclical, so why not music?

Additional Mention here