Recommended Album: Spiritual Cramp – ‘Spiritual Cramp’

For all of the element of danger they put front and center on their surface level, Spiritual Cramp polish up nicely for a bunch of punks. It helps that the members of the San Fran band collectively put enough time inside of recording studio before even forming to understand what makes for a great-sounding album, even if the start of their respective careers as artists dug their way out from the Bay Area’s underground, with vocalist Michael Bingham and bassist Michael Fenton being a part of the much-underrated 2010s-era gloom-punk outfit Creative Adult while guitarists Jacob Breeze and Nate Punty, drummer Julian Smith, and sometimes tambourine player / visual director José Luna-Gonzalez played in hardcore bands like Fentanyl, No Reality, Primal Rite, and Scalped. Nothing about the band sounds rough around the edges in their current light of their eponymous debut LP, but if you can imagine the trajectory Wes Eisold laid in those post-American Nightmare days with Cold Cave and apply it within a hotter temperature, you get an apt indication of how Spiritual Cramp exude a cool within their fire. The zipper of a listen melds the razor’s edge of ’70s punk, sharp angles of its post- and new wave eras, and the singe of Aughts garage rock neon, all punctuated with Bingham’s hives-raising goth howl that undoubtedly pulls from their live energy while doing something that’s become a rarity in today’s punk music in fussing over the details (while Bingham and Fenton co-produced it, Paramore and M83 album engineer as well as dad to half of the Linda Lindas, Carlos de la Garaza, mixed it, giving it a certain timeless alternative album luster.) Bingham himself is also a clear over-thinker not to his detriment, in penning lyrics surrounding self-absorption, be it our perpetually online states or that of our own vices and id, that never come off as put-on for show or too obtuse. Thus, you can easily state the case that for all of the visceral energy shaking Spiritual Cramp to its nervous core, the destruction is a great look.

Highlights: “Slick Rick”, “Herberts On Holiday”, “Better Off This Way”

Spiritual Cramp’s Spiritual Cramp is available now on Blue Grape Music.