nd Note is a striking experiment in spoken word and music. But don’t let that sentence scare you away. End Note is so far from any spoken word cliché (be it beret wearing Beats or Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam) that it may well create a genre all its own. Sure, rock music has toyed with various spoken word collaborations over the years (Jim Morrison’s psychedelic ramblings and William S. Burroughs collaboration with Kurt Cobain come to my mind) but rarely have spoken word and music acted in concert to produce actual songs.

Much of the success of End Note is due to the stellar musicianship of the players. Guitarist and mixer Joe Goldring has worked with the Swans, Toiling Midgets and Steve Von Till. Kevin Thomson is a veteran of Timco and Nice Strong Arm. Drummer Yuma Joe Byrnes has played with Tarnation, Broken Horse and others. But wordsmith Pete Simonelli shouldn’t be discounted either; his deep and resonant voice is essential to the albums success.

Simonelli is a writer of stories first, not a lyricist or a poet. The stories he tells within End Note are unabashedly literary. They work as well on the page as they do floating over the music. Characters torn from the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District and Tenderloin populate Simonelli’s stories. They live and die in bars, cigarettes jammed between their fingers, or on unforgiving sidewalks that hardly blink at their passing. He is a keen observer whether he’s chronicling the steady degradation of a friend or the slow tenuous unraveling of a relationship. It never feels like he is pandering to his characters. They simply exist within his recounting and they feel true.

Musically, Enablers are a powerful force. They teeter somewhere between the casual explosiveness of Timco’s Gentleman Jim and Tarnations’s moodier moments. The trio of Brynes, Thomson and Goldring produce a thick wall of sound that reverberates like an approaching storm, a deluge of near biblical proportions. The music is dark, slow, methodical, looming or sharp depending on Simonelli’s story. There’s a twisted surf guitar in some songs, played as if surfing is something that takes place on a roiling, darkened sea that stretches thick and black towards the horizon.

Do these two disparate elements need each other, though? There’s little doubt that End Note is an experiment of sorts. The album was recorded live in January of 2003 and begs the question: which came first the music or the words? Ultimately it doesn’t matter. That’s End Note‘s triumph. The music carries the words, they push each other, peaking at the same moment, screaming at each other and then weeping in consolation.

“Pauly’s Last Days in Cinema” is a good test case for much of the album. It’s a chronicle of unraveling. We watch Pauly at the bar, pity him hunting an untenable solace in female companionship, “someone he can treat like a stooge”. It’s a startling moment when halfway through the song the man with the “scrawny, rummy-wan frame” hefts a hundred pound desk above his head “smashing the fucker to kindling” as the neighbors “gape at what might come next”. The band’s roiling beat chased by a simple guitar line, haunted by a distant unspooling of feedback. The music takes control of the situation whirling off into hazy feedback, howling guitar and organ. Simonelli is barely audible under the din, repeating over and over, “he pisses in jars in basements”.

In “A Not So Pretty Sight in Steinbeck Country” Simonelli describes the ejection of a man from his car at 80 miles an hour. The band hums like the road behind the words. A Hammond organ, an eerie guitar run, Simonellli’s voice, never rise beyond a tired moan as the car catapults “the body into a panorama of ancient trees and Van Gogh yellows”.

There’s something special going on in End Note. The band and the spoken word really feel like they belong together. Neither bows to the other, neither insists on being the focal point of the song. And while the album to be digested as a whole, it’s not hard to put this on faced with the prospect of a long drive. Trust me: you’ll find yourself driving past your destination, waiting for the last word and note before circling back towards your life.