Jim Anderson

It’s the taping for an early November episode of venerable UK music show Later… with Jools Holland and 24-year-old Al Spx is making her television debut with only a single to her Cold Specks moniker. She stands in the centre of room, bathed in a blue spotlight, hands clasped and eyes closed, and launches into a haunting a capella gospel version of Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Old Stepstone.” The rest might soon be history. Her performance garnered heaps of praise on both sides of the Atlantic, record deals were officially announced with Arts & Crafts in Canada and Mute in the UK, and her debut album I Predict A Graceful Expulsion is set for release next month. It was a showstopping debut, but it almost didn’t happen.

“I lost my passport the night before I was supposed to fly out and it was the most expensive mistake I’ve ever made,” says Spx. “I had to get an emergency passport, got there in time, found out my amp was broken, my throat was really bad. I was terrified.”

A native of Etobicoke, ON, Spx began with humble musical aspirations, writing songs as a product of “boredom” and playing the occasional show in the kitchens and backyards of friends during university. Cold Specks as it is wasn’t an idea until a few years ago when the older brother of a friend in the UK took an interest in her early, private demos and convinced her to fly to London to work with him.

“I didn’t think much of them,” says Spx of those demos. “He stole a copy [from his brother] then spent months phoning me up trying to get me to work with him, so I went out to work with him.”

From there, the two arranged the songs, found Spx a band, and developed her sound. She describes her music as “doom soul” and chuckles when I bring it up.

“We came home one night and we were updating the [Facebook band page] and I jokingly wrote ‘doom soul,'” she explains. “The next day a blog had picked up on it and it just went [kaboom].”

“I don’t really like to categorize things and I think when I have to it’s funny to say something like ‘doom soul.’ It’s dark and it’s also kind of soulful.”

It’s accurate for a joke. Songs on I Predict A Graceful Expulsion draw on blues, gospel, and folk traditions, anchored by Spx’s husky, quivering powerhouse of a voice. It’s an arresting instrument, and amazingly something she didn’t know she possessed until high school.

“I took a music and computers course and we had to have a live instrument on one of the projects and I decided to sing,” says Spx. “I had no idea that I could until I played it to my teacher who told me that I could sing, that I could hit notes.”

Spx is a self-taught musician, which made the process of translating her ideas to a full band difficult. For example, she based her guitar tuning on six notes that most closely resembled the sound of an oud, a traditional North African and Middle Eastern instrument.

“They found it really hard to learn my songs because they’re not very structured. The tuning’s completely random. I don’t believe in counting beats-it’s not that I don’t, but I just have a hard time doing it.”

The result is an album peppered with fluid, off-kilter rhythms and phrasing, like on lead single “Holland,” “Elephant Head,” and album closer “Lay Me Down.” As laborious as it may have been to get the band on the same page, everything comes together to create Spx’s unique musical voice, one she never expected to take her this far.

“I just thought I’d record some songs on my laptop and pass them around to friends.”

I Predict A Graceful Expulsion is out May 22. For more information visit www.coldspecks.com