I Like The Spits.

The Spits aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Anecdotal evidence would tend to suggest they’ve been around for years, and they have a tangled discography fulla live EPs, split singles and the like to keep the wouldbe Spits fanatic busy for, ooh, hours. But for whatever reason, The Spits had flown beneath my radar until this January, when their ‘Vol. 4 / School’s Out!’ album effectively BECAME my radar.

Eight or nine weeks later, I’m still listening to it every single day – no kidding. Thankfully that doesn’t require much of an effort, because it’s only fifteen minutes long. Such conciseness of purpose immediately puts The Spits on my Christmas card list. Music aside though, I still don’t really know where The Spits are coming from, whether they’re polite book-smarts guys playing dumb or just a gang of big, angry lummoxes from the middle o’ nowhere, so the card might remain unsent pending an address. But whoever they are, they SPEAK RAMONES, and that means we’re talkin’.

The Spits have a human drummer who sounds like a drum machine and they have big, distorted Jerry Only type bass. They have toxic, monotone fuzz guitar and a vocalist who sounds like a surly drunk from a Lenny Bruce sketch. They have cheap wavo/Devo keyboards and Liquid Sky sci-fi/horror shenanigans to liven things up too, but that’s all gravy. I appreciate that they are probably working to whims of a relatively small audience who consider this sort of thing The Most Perfect Music Ever, but if that audience ever get together to start a formal organisation, I’m gonna try and run for treasurer or entertainments secretary, so the hell with ya if you think different.

During the brief run-time of ‘Vol. 4’, The Spits make their platform abundantly clear. The Spits like: parties, beer, aliens, petty crime. The Spits dislike: teachers, the police, girls who dump them, living in a van. And like The Ramones and The Misfits before them, they have a beautiful and persuasive sense of melody with which to sell us on these emotionally sound but sometimes ethically impractical proposals, for at least as long as those robot-drums keep thrumming away. Truly a band who speak for the heart & soul of the common man. Hallelujah!

So make sure to listen to “Tonight” and “Life Of Crime” on their myspace each day, and I hope that soon you’ll be onside as we join The Spits in pursuit of an all round better life for everyone.

http://www.myspace.com/thespits
http://www.thespits.com/index.html

Their live shows certainly look like... an experience:

Labels: I like, punk rock, The Spits