What’s in a name? Would a band borrowing the moniker of a different pasta dish sound as strange? Spaghetti — A collective of four idiosyncratic composers that came together about a year ago — played a rare gig at Berkeley’s Back Room on Jan. 21 to a standing room only audience, and the results were both entirely satisfying and often wonderfully weird.
Featuring Sam Reider on accordion and piano, Mat Muntz on double bass, drummer Scott Amendola, and guitarist Jim Campilongo, Spaghetti occupies an indeterminate zone where country music, jazz, and rock converge. Each player contributes tunes, which often bear unmistakable traces of their distinctive musical personalities.
Amendola has long had a penchant for slow, crunching tunes that would sound at home on a Neil Young and Crazy Horse album. His piece “Evil Eye” unfurled like a storm viewed from a distance as it sweeps across a prairie.
Guitarist Jim Campilongo is the group’s unofficial leader and often hilarious emcee. His piece “Ray Mercer” feinted, bobbed, and walloped like the boxer who inspired the tune. The aggressive twang of his guitar lines is probably Spaghetti’s defining sonic element, with the other players responding to his long sinewy lines. As a Texan friend recently remarked, “every guitarist in Austin wants to sound like Jim Campilongo.”
The group works along two volatile axes: Amendola and Muntz push and pull the beat while Campilongo and Reider throw lines and ideas back and forth. Reider, a recent new parent, introduced several tunes inspired by the desire for slumber, like the lovely, dreamy “Lay Me Down.” His accordion work and Muntz’s loping bass line suggested the wide-open range on “I Can’t Remember Your Middle Name.”
The quartet closed the show with Reider’s “The Chase,” a romping piece that would have fit in neatly on his suite inspired by the Golem. Two encores offered different views of the band’s scope, with a delicate, lullaby-like ballad and a moody, spooky piece that brought the group back to where it had started the night. It will be very interesting to see what ingredients these musicians add to Spaghetti in the coming months.
