Scott Helland’s Guitarmy of One ‘The Spy Detective Collective’
The Spy Detective Collective from Scott Helland’s Guitarmy of One will strike a chord with those schooled in ’60s-era surf-rock and Henry Mancini themes.
The Spy Detective Collective
Independent
26 March 2021
What, at first blush, seems like a misstep or an oversight on Scott Helland’s interesting spy-themes LP, the appropriately titled
The Spy Detective Collective, often turns out to be one of the album’s more notable strengths. Yes, we know the students of the orthodoxy will shout “Judas!” at Helland, who goes by the nom de guerre of Guitarmy of One and gets some of the spy genre’s details “wrong”. But, it is often done with a great service to the final product. For one, these bright-eyed, soundtrack-ready offerings, ten of them in all, lack many of the genre’s lynchpins – say, the driving bass lines of a “Peter Gunn”, the glossed-over shadows of Mancini, or the reverb-dripping Fender guitars oft associated with the form. Helland’s entire record, in fact, is a collection of largely looped refrains played almost entirely on the acoustic guitar (!) with just spare percussion keeping time. It’s an odd place to go looking for James Bond or