You can't just train some rando thug to move and fight the way Peter moves and fights. There's an X factor there that no amount of eidetic memory will cover!
Spiritual Cramp
O’Brien’s Pub, Allston, MA
Thursday, October 18th, 2018
For those of you who’ve been following the blog for a while, you know that my favorite type of music to cover is, without exception, (post-)punk music. The visceral, animated energy of a punk show is the height of live performance, to the point where everything else can start to seem a bit tame when the room isn’t undulating with elbows and knees crashing into your back and sides.
Enter Spiritual Cramp, a six-piece punk band from San Francisco, embarking on their first nationwide tour in support of their debut LP, ‘Television’. The album follows on the heels of two successful EPs, ‘Mass Hysteria’ and ‘Police State’, dark and gritty releases that defy the typical characterization of music out of California and showcase a darker side of what is often thought of as an idyllic location. Throughout the record, frontman Michael Bingham’s lyrics paint a rather bleak portrait of life in his city, and in America at large.
If your first impression of the band is their recently-released single ‘The Erasure’, and its music video replete with bright colors, confetti, dancing stripper cops, and tight indie-rock editing, you might wonder if punk is the proper designation; but one listen to the content of the album or EPs will give you a better idea of the true bent of the band. I’d compare it to a group like Shame, whom I recently covered here as well; that band came on the scene with the radio-ready ‘One Rizla’, but that didn’t do a damn thing to dampen the effect of their first LP - and the same can be said for Spiritual Cramp.
The band’s music taps into an omnipresent personal and societal anxiety that is endemic to this current place and time, lacing tales of paranoia and depression - there’s a song called ‘I Feel Bad Bein’ Me’, after all - around a sound that calls back to bands like The Clash and Mission of Burma. Bingham is quite adept in the usage of his voice, sometimes evoking Strummer and Jones, perhaps even a bit of David Byrne’s wobbly lower register; other times he fully sublimes into the primal, noisy sound, like on their eponymous track ‘Spiritual Cramp’. Perhaps the most effective demonstration of their sound and ethos, though, is the closer to ‘Mass Hysteria’, a track called ‘The Ice Age Isn’t Fucking Coming’, where Bingham repeats, “Violence keeps me up at night/Violence keeps me warm at night”, highlighting the vicious cycle of violence that alternately sustains and suppresses different social groups, especially those living in urban areas.
Packed into the tiny space at O’Brien’s Pub on a chilly Allston night, one of the first of its kind this year, the kind of night where you can see your breath outside, Spiritual Cramp’s live show proves they can hang with the best of them. The band is absolutely wild with abandon, none more than tambourine player Max Wickham, who, clad in a shirt reading “Why Not Us?”, jumps around the stage with seemingly boundless energy. But everyone onstage is moving, jumping, screaming (even if they’re not mic’d), and giving their all. Between songs, Bingham speaks openly about his anxiety - even the approachable ‘Erasure’ belies the darker truth of living with it - and in his performance, in the pained expressions on his face and the beads of sweat running down his cheeks, you can see a man exorcising his demons, one impassioned performance at a time. Wickham breaks his tambourine on the wedge to close out the night, as if he too needed catharsis.
Their set is short, but leaves a larger impact - like many punks the world over, Spiritual Cramp are out there in cramped bars and clubs night after night, confronting the ugly truths of society through the raw power of music and art.
