The Spark
Plankeye (Tooth & Nail Records)
What you consider “hard” music depends entirely on all the music you have heard up to that point in your life when you finally find yourself listening to something “hard.” Your accumulated inner catalogue of songs becomes a compass telling you if a song has a “hard” or “soft” sound. And just like eating spicy food or watching a horror movie, the first time you hear “hard” music it sends a significant jolt to your system. It shakes up and realigns all the music you ever listened to before. This is especially true if (like me) you were a Christian kid growing up in an environment where Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Rich Mullins were “normal” music and DC Talk and Newsboys were “hard” music.
If I remember right, the first “hard” musical jolt to my system was MxPx’s Pokinatcha, but the second was most definitely Plankeye’s The Spark. Where MxPx seemed undisciplined and messy (at least on their first album) Plankeye’s music was permeated with a raw desperation, found in their energetic hooks and singer Scott Siletta’s growling vocal screams. This was music that shook me. It is quite obvious now Plankeye is not that
“hard,” but to me and my ears I felt like I had found some kind of outer edge of music.
I am pretty sure the first time I ever heard of, saw, or listened to Plankeye was on Z TV’s Brimstone Chronicles, the CCM version of MTV’s version of 120 Minutes:
On one hand, the interview segments of the show reveal Plankeye to be immature young men, barely in their twenties. They come off entirely green — just guys having fun, playing music, telling kids about God, relishing the grind of life on the road. As a teenager, I saw something different, even though I would not have been able to articulate it at the time: a type of Christian masculinity I had never seen before. Simply by being themselves, Plankeye managed to subvert the pretty-boy images of mainstream CCM, and convey authentic, sincere faith. They projected a tougher, more aggressive Christianity that felt no need to portray a happy-all-the-time image. And then there was the music:
Here was something strange to me, something I can best sum up by calling it “angst-ridden hope.” It was a sincere expression of faith put into a medium otherwise reserved for the “godless” rock of secular radio. And it was all the more rebellious for using a genre of rebellion to point kids back to God (a sentiment Tooth & Nail founder Brandon Ebel expressed in the recent documentary No New Kinda Story).
And here exactly is the reason Christian independent music exists and indeed is necessary: it was for teenagers like me who were awake enough to themselves to know there was something wrong in them that only God could fix. The songs of Plankeye (and others) released us to take the Kierkegaardian leap into God’s arms, thrashing our guitars while we did it.
This was youth group music at its best. Whereas mainstream grunge and alternative music distrusted and rebelled against “the establishment” but also resulted in a hatred of the self, the grunge and alternative music of Christian artists spurned a distrust and rebellion against the self which then resulted in receiving the love and mercy of a God who gave himself for us.
Regular grunge starts with hating ourselves and ends with hating everyone; Christian grunge starts in the same place, but ends with a love of the self because God first loved us. If anything, despite their pedestrian lyrics, this was the thesis of Plankeye’s “Open House”: “Broken man/ he’s got you on his mind” and “You’ve got to give it up/ be free!” It’s hardly poetry, but the musical performance says it all — I need you, God. There is nothing else.
This is why something like the “Chrindie” designator is necessary. “Chrindie” is a term declaring that “Christian” music did not always pander to trends and does not always need to wrap up the Christian faith in trite clichés, that it instead was genuine and real and significant and unique and deeply impacting in its own way. This is who Plankeye was as a band, managing to sound like the times, but not a cheap imitation of them.
The Spark is sweaty. It is workhorse music. It feels gritty. It feels like a basement church youth group room or village hall in July. It sounds like your brother’s band, only better. It sounds like the band just got there and they are setting up and there is a rush to get through the songs, an overall urgency to move. It makes you feel like you need to move towards God and move away from yourself.
Plankeye’s lyrics may be clunky and fragmented platitudes about faith, but if anybody else had sung these songs — Twila Paris, Steven Curtis Chapman, Clay Crosse, whoever — the impact would have been lost. ‘90s Alterna-kids were not going to feel desperation because some smiling adult told us we needed God. We needed someone our own age, with the same desperation and self-doubt, to tell us we needed God. This is exactly who Plankeye were.
Some music is intentionally ambivalent or ambiguous, causing a conflict within the listener who is forced to figure out an all-but-indiscernible meaning. Plankeye, though, has no layers — their meaning is all on the surface, and that is the point. The conflict they create for the listener in their case is Will you move? Will you change direction? Will you move further in to the sickness of your own soul or reverse and move towards God?
Adult CCM did not have the same musical vehicle to carry these emotions, which is why it often felt trite and preachy and clichéd. It was trying to convey the same truths of the faith and our need of God, but the music itself, if not derivative of mainstream pop, was almost always lightweight. Plankeye, despite their inability to articulately and poetically express deep thoughts on God and faith and the human struggle, was able to express deep emotion. Their music was the proper vehicle for taking you to the place where you knew you needed God.
Scott Silletta’s default and most effective vocal presence is anguish. He has a limited range and sometimes seems to hardly know what melody he is singing, but whether he’s praying for that girl in the back of the church (“Tonight”), a friend contemplating suicide (“Boy”), or himself (“It’s a Perfect Day Jerome”), he is at his best when he almost sounds like he’s in pain. This is how we know he is not telling us how to live our lives from up on a moral pedestal. He actually is praying for that girl, he does want his friend to know God loves him, and those prayers for God are all his own.
Though they have a limited musical palette, the rest of the band on The Spark matches Silletta’s intensity and urgency. Eric Balmer (guitar) and Luis Garcia (bass) are able to come up with tightly packed ear-wormy hooks while Adam Ferry (drums) lays down the backbone. Throughout the album, it is evident these are still musicians coming into their own, and their sound noticeably matured over the next few albums, even after Silletta left the band.
The the so-called immaturity I’ve alluded to (of lyrics, music, or persona) on The Spark was and is nothing to get hung up on. Plankeye may not have been sophisticated, but they offered listeners a real and sincere experience — musically, emotionally, spiritually, and even intellectually. The alternative Christian music of the ‘90s existed for one simple reason: to give kids like me a chance to sing-scream “Without you God there’d be a big old hole inside of me!!” in our own voices, with music that sounded like us.
Without bands like Plankeye I do not know if we ever would have realized such an expression was even possible, that the faith of our fathers could become our own. The sounds of the music may change, but the cries to God remain the same.
Chris Marchand is married, has three kids, and spends as much time as he can digesting music, film, literature, and theology. He is the principal of a small school and the music pastor of a church plant in Peoria, Illinois. He blogs on art and faith at www.postconsumerreports.com, has a semi-regular podcast at https://soundcloud.com/postconsumer, and a semi-semi-regular music page at http://chrismarchand.bandcamp.com/.
