Lee Ketch “Spiritual Milk For American Babes” Review
“There’s only music so that there’s new ringtones” sang a 19 year old Alex Turner on the Arctic Monkeys’ debut record from 2006. Technology has rapidly shifted our lives since then, but this demoralizing sentiment has been a continuous theme felt by all working musicians, including myself, and has made us ask the question “what is the value of making music?”
Many of my peers can’t escape the specter of social media and streaming numbers looming over us. As devoted as one can be to being a pure artist, many of us can’t escape the dream of making that “perfect” universally loved record. One that is endlessly inventive and artistic and personal, but engaging and immediate enough for the most casual and the most critical of listeners. The white whale of many musicians. A dream that might finally have us being vindicated and appreciated, both in cyberspace and beyond. Does our music finally have value then?
But then there is Chicago’s Lee Ketch.
Known for being the leader of the band Mooner, playing in numerous groups, and putting out several experimental side projects for the past decade plus, Lee has already made one of these perfect records. Mooner’s vastly under-appreciated, The Alternate Universe of Love, released in Fall 2020, was filled with impeccable playing by his bandmates, the tastiest guitar tones you’ll hear anywhere, a healthy amount of beautiful noise, and a plethora of hooks. This was a record with all the necessary ingredients and buzzwords to reach that mythical “perfect” status. But as goes in the world of record making these days, it is getting harder and harder for great artists to be given their flowers, without a whole team behind them, or even a particular savvy in the newest social media mediums. The Alternate Universe of Love unfortunately went the way of the countless bands that Jeff Tweedy referenced on “The Late Greats”
“So good you won’t ever know
I never hear it on the radio”
Photo by Ayethaw Tun
After the release of this album, Lee put his efforts into two projects. The first being a yet to be released industrial hardcore, nu-metal, noise project, featuring hellish vocals by a demon baby and blastbeat poly-rhythmic drums triggered by his guitar playing. The second, is the record you have here Spiritual Milk for American Babes.
The title was inspired by a 17th century catechism by minister John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, the first children’s book to be published in North America. Like a children’s book, Lee forgoes the intellectual dance of adult record making and taps into something primal and beautiful and spectacularly visual. In conversations I’ve had with Lee, he mentions how he spent his younger years envisioning himself working within film, but grew up making music instead. His vast knowledge of cinematic language and understanding of that medium has never been more apparent in his music than it does here.
To achieve this, Lee recruited several “unsung geniuses” of the Chicago music scene. Most notable was drummer, composer, and music educator Ethan Parcell. Lee and Ethan went to Doug Malone’s Jamdek Recording Studio, with Lee asking Ethan to improvise either freely or to play along to a click track. Within these numerous improvisations, Lee took sections of these recordings and would write guitar parts and lyrics over them. Lee stated that he “loved the idea of secret structures emerging from someone just playing to play, totally unprompted.”
This method informed the ethereal title track, the muscular and groovy “Other Neighborhoods,” and the otherworldly and surreal “I’m In The Living Room” and “I’ve Been Thinking About Pastor Ted Roberts.” The childlike wonder of song structures emerging from the title track for example, becomes the complete antithesis of the practice of making “perfect” records. The untethered drums mixed with the acoustic guitar/synth improvisations of Lee, pianist Alec Watson, trumpeter and synth player Aaron Esposito, and Ethan Parcell’s own clarinet playing, feels like complete unbridled joy. The kind of music making that would make one smile in their first few months of picking up an instrument. However, when Lee’s voice enters and sings “Will you love me forever? Lord, I’m always in Your way”, everything that comes before is recontextualized. What could have been a joyous cascade of instruments clattering together, becomes a focused and rather singular representation of the yearning and dissonance we all feel as human beings.
Photo by Ayethaw Tun
In “I’m In The Living Room,” Lee trades vulnerability and holiness for the surreal and even banal, with his disembodied voice seeking to connect you to a Zoom call with little to no success, seemingly as if he was in some sort of purgatory. Juxtaposed with these non-sequitur ramblings, comes some achingly beautiful swells and sweet melodies underneath. A rush of percussion, layers of beautiful synths, pedal-steel like guitars; this is the kind of treatment a lesser artist would save for their biggest confession/biggest truth. Instead, in plain voice, Lee is instructing us on how to get the wi-fi set up. This mismatch feels like the musical equivalent of the Dada art movement and its embrace of nonsense and the irrational. With this splash of the avant-garde comes something that ends up carrying meaning pre-disposed by the listener themselves. The contradiction at play gives off new feelings every time I listen to this track.
Even in the songs composed more traditionally, Lee finds ways to bring these experiments into the fray. The beautiful and lush “Supergroup” features a soaring bridge section, featuring the same ensemble mentioned before as well as his father, Brad Ketch on synth, improvising and finding meaning in melody and play. The whole time this is building to its climax, you get a chopped and screwed sample (from what I presume is Sebastian Bach speaking) from the unhinged VH1 reality show Supergroup. There is a certain beauty in these contrasts and you can find them all over this record.
Album closer “Living Will” gives us a little taste of Lee playing up to his knowledge of making “perfect” songs. “To the love of my life, I’m so sorry I know that you wanted us to die at exactly the same time” Lee exclaims as if he was Leonard Cohen fronting Sonic Youth. Again these are the kinds of buzzwords you would find in the reviews of mythical rock albums, but here Lee saves it for his ride into the sunset, but not without giving you an unwieldy, almost anti-rockstar guitar solo.
Lee mentioned to me that after taking several swings at making that proverbial “perfect” record, he hopes now to instead make music that inspires others. On Spiritual Milk he may no longer be trying to please the world, but in return he has created something more special. Something where the value becomes priceless. A record that might just be perfect for him.