Spresso’s Pretty Penny Slur strips rock to its bare essentials

Stick a pin in a map of the contemporary DIY avant garde, and you’re likely to land on something Mica Levi has touched in some way. Prolific as a producer, a collaborator, a film scorer, a solo artist, and the leader of Good Bad Happy Sad (fka Micachu and the Shapes), they’ve quietly amassed a deep catalog of warped, discomfiting tunes over the past 15 years.

Spresso — Levi’s duo with fellow London experimentalist Leisha Thomas (aka Alpha Maid), who turned heads in 2021 with an excellent EP called CHUCKLE — arrived unceremoniously last May. Their self-titled debut joint tape, scrappy and virtually unpromoted (like most of Levi’s work), is a sampler of the fuzzed-out, jagged-edged, ultra-brief guitar tracks they’ve continued to release since.

Skimming the next 16 months of their output — two more EPs, and now, a 16-track, 18-minute album titled Pretty Penny Slur — you’ll find only two songs that go significantly past the two-minute mark, and just a small handful with discernible vocals. Pretty Penny Slur, released earlier this week (again without advance notice), contains no such luxuries. Here, Thomas and Levi remain within the bounds of Spresso’s Platonic form: the former shredding lead guitar, the latter behind the boards, disturbing these lashing chord progressions with subtly unsettled production.

Pretty Penny Slur fades in on the slow, grungy power chords of “Once an olympic star fainted in the tournament,” underscored only by a detuned, flatulent bass line, before stumbling into the more sure-footed “it badly hurt their shoulder,” where industrial percussion bashes in to drive the track toward its conclusion with the menace of a Melvins intro.

From there, the punk gets thrashier and the sounds get thinner, as if Levi is rolling them out like pasta on a counter or processing them through a broken black hole. Each track finds the duo operating at maximum efficiency, discarding any potential filler on the kitchen floor or in a trash heap of cosmic detritus.

It’s worth noting that Pretty Penny Slur’s tracklist can be read as a short story. Its synopsis is as follows: A star athlete sustains a career-ending injury, attempts to start a second career in porn, has a passionate affair with the wife of a wealthy man, turns to crime to pay for top surgery, gets caught, is betrayed by their paramour, and flees south. This Calvino-esque table of contents is rendered in the third person, except on track 12, “and called the police on me,” wherein Spresso hint that our desperate, lovelorn former Olympian has been them the whole time.

An analysis of Pretty Penny Slur through this plot line could yield interesting results but is entirely unnecessary to appreciate the project. Even the dissection of the piece into sixteen distinct fragments is only helpful in the abstract, creating mile markers for the restless mind. As a listener, it’s best experienced straight through, without such distractions.

About a third of the way into the album, after the “Third Uncle”-style joy ride of “they started a relationship with a millionaires wife,” the record returns from its agitated state to its slower, sludgier roots, but there’s tension in the slightly unsynced slacker rhythms and dissonant melodies that bring the album past its halfway point.

“and called the police on me” describes a transitional period in the project, expressing a state of uncertainty through a slippery, shifting pulse. Then we’re back in the thick of the action, cantankerous drumming pushing us into a panic. There’s some disquieted rest to be found on the album’s penultimate track, “insomnia,” but its 13-second closer, “cash converters,” returns us to chaos and ends abruptly, like a sentence cut off by an em dash.

Pretty Penny Slur is easily Spresso’s most fully realized universe yet, but it provides little in the way of resolution. It can feel at times like an incomplete thought or a half-baked plan, one that comes tantalizingly close to locking into place but never quite gets there. In the context of Levi’s oeuvre, though, this frustrating effect feels less like the result of laziness or light trolling than the machinations of a master sculptor, one whose steps are illegible to anyone outside their mind, but whose final work will be unmistakable in the end.