Spiritual Cramp
Spiritual Cramp
BLUE GRAPE
The highlight of Spiritual Cramp’s 2017 debut EP Mass Hysteria, “Wrecking Machine,” showcased the best of what the Bay Area punks band had to offer in a compact package. A Stooges-like mixture of nihilism and hedonism (complete with singer Michael Bingham’s best Iggy Pop impersonation), the track lived up to its name in the sense that you could imagine it playing at the most chaotic DIY house party—a window-smashing, beer-bottle-chucking, noise-ordinance-violating bacchanal of the dingiest order. Suffice it to say, it’s as much fun as you can have with a distortion pedal and a yen for mayhem.
Spiritual Cramp have grown considerably since that early release, including graduating to much larger stages on which to deploy their wrecking machine (let it not go unsaid that this is a live band to be reckoned with). But on their self-titled debut full-length, the group surges with furious but streamlined punk-rock energy, polishing their punchy, fun-as-hell garage-punk anthems into radio-friendly bursts of big hooks and bigger guitars. The Clash-like mixture of old-school punk and reggae that marked their EPs is still here in part, particularly on the dubby intro of leadoff track “Blowback.” But by and large these are three-chord rippers that have little use for intros and interludes, getting right to the action with little to no fluff or throat-clearing to get in the way.
As raw and urgent as the material on Spiritual Cramp is, it’s rarely as politically venomous as earlier releases such as 2018’s Police State, whose “850 Bryant” contained an inflammable antagonism toward law enforcement and a thirst for arson. Which doesn’t necessarily mean the group doesn’t have a few bones to pick, whether sneering at social media addicts on “Talkin’ on the Internet” or reckoning with self-destructive tendencies on the explosive, awesome “Better Off This Way” (“I’m always looking for trouble / I’m always inching closer to the edge”). Most notable of all amid the group’s inward- and outward-directed fury is the surprisingly tender “Herberts on Holiday,” a charming and catchy two and a half minutes of new-wave pop that’s also the rare love song in Spiritual Cramp’s repertoire, finding Bingham sweetly declaring, “I don’t know where I would be / If I never met you.”
That rare moment of tenderness aside, there are very few songs throughout Spiritual Cramp’s debut that don’t rev up the wrecking machine. Not many bands are making wild, reckless party punk that’s this purely enjoyable, and Spiritual Cramp waste no time in doing it—the full album clocks in at a lean 25 minutes. Which is more than adequate time to trash the joint.
