One of the most tired clichés in thinking about rock music goes like this: not a lot of people bought the first Velvet Underground record at the time of its release but everybody who did consequently started a band of their own.
A similar equation can be applied to the early career of Mike Fellows, the man currently producing music under the name Miighty Flashlight. Not a ton of people saw his first band, Rites of Spring (which also included Guy Piciotto of Fugazi), play live, but everyone who did developed an intense desire to violently bear their sensitive side on stage. It’s a commonly held belief that Rites of Spring is the granddaddy of the often unfortunate (but initially well-intentioned) emo mindset in punk rock. You know, Vulcan-haired boys singing about summer, notebooks, backpacks, and — sometimes — girls.
After the Spring, Fellows’ second incarnation in the indie music world was as a session musician par excellence. Throughout the nineties, he brought his exquisite guitar and bass playing to the studio and on the road for artists like Royal Trux and Will Oldham, always holding off on releasing material of his own — until now, with the self-titled Miighty Flashlight record on the Jade Tree label.
This album is totally pastoral, a subdued guitar trip of fingerpicking and surprising lo-fi electronic touches. It’s no less impassioned than Rites of Spring, but couldn’t sound more different. Does Fellows worry about freaking out the fans of his first band? After all, the reverence shown for Rites of Spring often borders on the evangelical, and it’s been years since he’s put his name on a record of his own. “[Rites of Spring fans] will think about Miighty Flashlight not too long. They’ll imagine themselves as themselves,” Fellows says in typically cryptic fashion. “I can’t wait,” he decides. The flames of hyperbole on Rites of Spring — and harDCore in general — were recently fanned by the publication of Dance of Days, a comprehensive but overly agenda-ed history of one of the capitol city’s indigenous musics. It’s been floating through the punk grapevine that several of the principal players covered in the book are not too happy with co-writers Mark Jenkins and Mark Anderson’s work. And what about Mike Fellows — does he have any dreams of stepping to DC’s self-appointed chroniclers? “If I could stop crying all the time, I would,” he says.
He needn’t worry at all — his music is a lovely thing in line with recent releases by like minds such as Silver Jews and Papa M. What exactly does the moniker Miighty Flashlight mean? According to Mike, “Currently, it means the death of celebrity worship.”
There’s guitar virtuosity on display in Fellows’ songs that manages to simultaneously thrill and calm — songs are cool and melancholy by turns. “I was blindly stabbing at the Jansch/Page nexus mostly,” Mike declares, referring to the cult British folkie and guitar revolutionary Bert Jansch and his most famous protégé, Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. Fellows shouldn’t be too humble about his lineage — he really does accomplish an updating of Jansch’s style, sending shimmering and complex musical figures out from his instrument. Along with his lackadaisical singing voice, a southern Gothic drawl, the Miighty Flashlight has created some positively futuristic and human folk music.
JENNA PAMESON
Miighty Flashlight
is out now on Jade Tree Records.
