Bleeding

Pollstar: Regarding the business side of Sixpence, are you and Matt the sole members, essentially owning the band 50/50?

Is Sixpence None the Richer a band?

That's an odd question; by all accounts, they are -- they've got guitars, drums, etc., and "Sixpence None the Richer" is not a pseudonym for a solo artist (unlike, say, Nine Inch Nails or even the lesser known Christian band/artist Plumb, which most people assumed was a band when Sixpence bassist J J Plasencio joined it, but was later said to merely be the nom de rock of one Tiffany Arbuckle).

But Sixpence has been through numerous lineup changes in their twenty years, and since around 2004, they've been marketed more as a duo than a band. Publicity photos no longer include any other band members but Slocum and Nash, which makes more sense, really -- especially if you remember the two versions of the photo in their self-titled record: the 1997 version with Slocum, Nash, and Dale Baker (a guitarist, a drummer, and a singer do not a band make), the 1999 one with Slocum, Nash, Baker, and Justin Cary and Sean Kelly, the latter two of whom played not a single note on the original recording.

Many hardcore Sixpence fans, or at least those nerdy enough to be on a long-running Yahoo email list about the band, which has been heating up in anticipation of their new record which is out tuesday , see the 1995-ish lineup for This Beautiful Mess and the subsequent tour as the definitive period of Sixpence as a band. It's hard to argue with this: in terms of a cohesive unit, it's the most deep and versatile the band qua band has been -- Baker, Plasencio, and Slocum worked well as an instrumental core, all of them having played together for long enough to read each other well -- the several versions of the "Meaningless" jam available on bootlegs attest to this. I've never actually seen or heard the version of the band with Wiley on guitar and vocals, but having another woman on BGVs would certainly have been another strength -- Sixpence appears to be touring with another female vocalist (Kate York, perhaps?) at the moment; and the video clips of Jerry Dale McFadden trying his best falsetto to match Leigh are...a bit much.

So: let's take "Bleeding" as Sixpence's quintessential "band" album track: the persistent, hypnotic drumming intro, the plodding bassline, all kinds of guitar agony: a desolate landscape is evoked. It's not that other Sixpence recordings are not textured and evocative, but this is one of the few tracks where we really get a sense that there could be a rock and roll band making this noise together in a room. (Never mind whether that really happened -- the point is it feels like a band, unlike some of Sixpence's other masterful recordings, also full and deep, but more orchestral and arranged. We're talking about the difference between, say, The rock-band Radiohead of The Bends and the careful studio technician Radiohead of In Rainbows.)

I'm over the fact that Sixpence is no longer a guitar band, but this song probably does the most creative work with distorted guitars that we hear on TBM -- single chords ring forever and feedback is allowed to roam freely across the track, and the solo is less melody than roar. In a long-lost feature on the band form this era, writer from the Chrindie zine True Tunes quoted Slocum: "How did you like those My Bloody Valentine notebends I was doing?"

I'll go ahead and answer that: we liked them.

"Bleeding" goes a little over the top in the melancholy department; there's maybe not infinite sadness in the lyrics and the pleading drone they're sung in, but "I'm beating my soul to make it bleed a drop of hope" is about as brilliantly mopey as any Smashing Pumpkins track from the era. Yes, the Pumpkins: I will stop mentioning them when I talk about this record from now on, but they were mentioned by Slocum in an interview right before TBM was released, and the guitar tones here do owe something to that band, who in the 90's really were, in my book, the masters at eliciting pathos from distortion and feedback. "Bleeding" would not be the song it is if it were made by the Sixpence of the Fatherless and the Widow, where it would have been all reverb and acoustic strumming, nor the Sixpence of Divine Discontent, where the ringing feedback might've been replaced by a tasteful, swelling orchestra. This is Sixpence None the Richer as a 90's rock band, and they were great at it.