Spiritual Cramp have their very own Bez. Jose-Luna Gonzalez is the Bay Area band’s tambourine-playing mascot, popping up at their shows to provide auxiliary percussion and an extra sense of chaos to a group, usually outfitted in Fred Perry, who look like they could beat the shit out of you. Spiritual Cramp haven’t entirely carried this anarchic energy to their self-titled debut. Clear-cut and wound tight, there’s nothing here that could be considered auxiliary or chaotic. Across 10 tracks, the band packs in precise, hook-centered anthems with inspiring choruses: music made for people with a tried-and-tested vinegar solution for wiping the blood off their Brentham bombers.
Taking their name from a Christian Death song, Spiritual Cramp are among a wave of bands, including MSPAINT, Militarie Gun and Turnstile, who emerged from hardcore backgrounds and broadened their palettes to include softer, artsier flourishes. While those bands take their primary influences from the East Coast, Spiritual Cramp are proud anglophiles. Spiritual Cramp plays like a callback to 1977, when the Clash realized the natural alliances between punk and reggae, filtered through a hard-sashwaying garage rock lens. Spiritual Cramp integrate dub, spiky guitars, and oi-like crowd-starters, all with a kitschy wink rather than flatly imitating their predecessors. The music is ecstatic rather than enraged, semi-ridiculous rather than self-serious.
As a frontman, Michael Bingham sounds like the kind of guy who insists on snuffing out a candle with his fingers. You can practically hear the pressure of his clenched-fists in the steady burble of his rabble-rousing voice. Across Spiritual Cramp, he switches between hubristic pomposity and a less mannered call for help. The album’s sequencing is buttressed on this swing: the pendulum ride between the imperious coke come-up and the humbling consequences of the come-down. “I wanna fly everywhere and put the miles on my credit card,” Bingham sings on “Slick Rick” like Iggy Pop at his puffed-up peak, before beginning the next song, “Talkin’ on the Internet,” with his tail between his legs: “Another day/Another credit card declined,” he whines.
Bingham connects the political with the personal in the most on-the-nose way possible. “There’s a war on the TV and a war in my head,” he sings on “City on Fire” over a prickly guitar line. Bingham makes no attempt to be coy or subversive. His antiauthoritarianism scans gleefully teenage, his gestures deliberately vague. This isn’t to the band’s discredit: They’re striving for London Calling universality while knowing that cultural commentary isn’t their strong suit. Luckily, the songs are catchy enough to get away with it.
What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates. It’s a smart move, and one that plays surprisingly well to their anthemic tendencies. Slick and indelible, Spiritual Cramp inspires the same kind of fist-pumping and pogo-ing as the band’s unhinged live shows.
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