NYC Band of the Week: Spanish Prisoners

Borough: Brooklyn
Fun Fact: Frontman Leo Maymind's family emigrated from Latvia when he was just three years old. Pursuing a music career means he's the only one in his family who isn't on the cusp of a Ph.D.
Why They're Worth Watching: The deliberateness and diversity of the Prisoners' music means each song they record is its own little world, with a unique sound and feel.

For Fans Of: MK Ultra, Daniel Johnston, Moldy Peaches.

"I often find that people pay a lot less attention to music's lyrics. That's not a trend I follow," says soft-spoken Spanish Prisoners frontman and songwriter, Leo Maymind. "My lyrics are really important to me. I probably put more time into working on the them than I do the music, and I don't generally like other people's music if I don't like the lyrics. And I don't think that many people feel that way."

Albums don't often come as multifaceted as the Prisoners' debut, Songs to Forget, which runs the gambit from lo-fi punk to nostalgic acoustic pop to accordion-based folk, changing styles often and with little warning. Maymind, who also produced and played most of the instruments on the album before recruiting new permanent members Amberly Hungerford on organ and vocals and Mike Venutolo-Mantovani on drums and bass, gives the same attention to the production that he does to his words. It's his thoughtful songs, with intricate lyrics and a production aesthetic that favors electronically-tweaked acoustic sounds, that led to a slot opening for John Vanderslice.

"That was a dream come true," Maymind recounts. "I look up to Vanderslice as one of the people who crafts songs lyrically, with so much care. He's very good at making things sonically interesting, where you can listen to the same album or same song several times, and there'll be different things you hear each time. I love how he puts very specific details into his songs, but at the same time he's very seldom explicit with what the song's about."

The influence is clear on tracks like "Some Among Them Are Killers", also the song behind Spanish Prisoners' first video. Behind a lo-fi studio rock band whose distant guitars and drums sound reminiscent of Vanderslice's early solo rock, it's a first-person tale from the perspective of a man living where terrorism is part of everyday life. Not that all his songs deal with such somber material. Maymind's lyrics range from creative nonsense in the unabashedly weird punk "A Thousand Zimmermans" ("You sang of inner-city tan lines/like shotguns in the sand/voice as the strongest marrow/It whittled down my attention span") to the more conventionally poetic. Unsurprisingly, Maymind once aspired to be a poet, but found it too cloistered. Songwriting suits him better, he explains: "I want to write material people can relate to."

Related links:
Spanish Prisoners on MySpace
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