In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.”
The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding.
Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up.
The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed.