Spendtime Palace - Ms. Tenaja - ForTheLoveOfBands

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Spendtime Palace are no strangers to the indie music community and their new single, Ms. Tenaja won’t chase off any current fans or discourage newcomers. Short and sweet, Ms. Tenaja weaves its way through a two minute and twenty four second journey of unruffled temperament. It’s a little bit heady and a lotta bit California, it’s 70s by birth, but lyrically contemporary. Its infectious guitar progression, with a bit of Nirvana seasoning, staccatos its way through the entire track.

They’ve replaced saturated guitar and $24 fuzz pedals for a pretty, arpeggiated guitar parts in the choruses – for this reviewer, it’s what SoCal Indie is all about. They’ve nudged the listener onto a different plane in the choruses rather than the archetypal one, offering the listener other musical locks to be picked. The new single is linear, point A to point B, and never grants the listener a break nor does it “swing back around” as a prisoner of repetition.

Spendtime Palace are experts of guitar tones, there’s always a handful of great ones in their songs; I had to go back and check for myself. Lily Lee is a great example with its reverb-drenched guitar solo and perfect warm vibrato throughout; in its construction, Ms. Tenaja stacks sonic layers of single-coil wholesomeness as well.

On a side note, this is one of those tracks that has a pretty well-produced music video accompanying it. It’s a solid example of how one’s perception of a song changes, once seeing the visual. Thankfully for this Costa Mesa band, both are exceptional. The video injects a bit of light-heartedness to the track that may have been overlooked by just listening. In fact the video made me watch my favorite parts of Stand By Me all afternoon (I needed the afternoon off anyway). It’s like a coming of age movie, except all the members are of age.

It has bikes in it, lots of bikes, and who doesn’t like bikes?