“Consequences” – The Spectacular Fantastic

“Consequences” – The Spectacular Fantastic

An early-era Fingertips favorite returns for the second time in, oh, 20 years. The Spectacular Fantastic are still up to their semi-lo-fi, semi-power-poppy ways, guitars and fuzz and melodies at the ready. Clocking in at a pop-rock perfect 3:33, “Consequences” is adeptly built, with a solid underlying chug that gives the incisive guitar work time to stretch out. Frontman Mike Detmer sings in a tone that sounds one part irritated and one part wounded; it’s a fine line sometimes. There are even some loud-soft and fast-slow dynamics at play here, a perhaps unusual touch for such a homegrown enterprise.

“Consequences” grabs the ear with its opening line–“What I do when I do what I do/Is none of your business”; after that things get charmingly elusive in terms of both structure and content. The lyrics sound half defiant, half apologetic. Consciously or not, this appears to be reflected in a song that seems to operate in a middle ground between verse and chorus, somehow not possessing either thing fully. There is basically one eight-measure melody–it ascends, descends, and then sort of resolves and sort of doesn’t. While you’re left thinking about that, there is space for the guitar, in all its nicely articulated glory, its tone calling to us from another time and place. For variation, the main melody at one point gets delivered, stripped down, in half time. As for hooks, there is (kind of) one–the recurring, repeated lyrical phrase “I don’t care”–and yet its very concept is undermined, humorously (I think!), by the song’s title. The guy is braying about not caring and yet the song is called “Consequences.”

The Spectacular Fantastic is a loose-knit, intermittently gathered project fronted by Mike Detmer, whose day job for the past four years or so has him running a neighborhood coffee spot with his wife in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on the western outskirts of the greater Cincinnati metro area. (It’s called Funny Farm Coffee, another hint at the sense of humor Detmer deploys.) “Consequences” is a track from TSF’s forthcoming album, Fantasy Clouds, coming out later in February. Thanks to Mike for the MP3. By the way, all of the band’s releases–eight previous LPs and four EPs–are uploaded on the Internet Archive and are available there for free.

For those keeping score at home, the Spectacular Fantastic have been featured here three previous times: twice in the innocent days of 2005, and once more in the substantially less innocent year of 2016.