Album of the Week: The Spills – Occam’s Razor
About eight years too late for the ‘craze’ of rhyming your band name with ‘ills’, Wakefield’s Spills are thankfully a million miles away from Irish chancers the Thrills and also sonically distant from any Kills or Stills you could care to name.
If there’s a band worth comparing them to – and they’ll hate this, as it IS blindingly obvious – it’s fellow sons of Wakefield, the Cribs.
And by Cribs, I mean the Yorkshire sibling three-piece, heavily influenced by American guitar alt-pop, not the the Yorkshire sibling three-piece who were dismissed in many quarters simply for being chummy with Kaiser Chiefs.
US indie hangs heavily over Occam’s Razor from start to finish, but let’s not make out that’s a bad thing. Regular readers will know that Dinosaur Jr and Hüsker Dü records have us purring like kittens, so a UK band that draws on these influences and successfully channels them into their own identity is worth celebrating.
Occam’s Razor is a blast from start to finish – awash with serrated guitar distortion and melodic high points. Opener Lockets is something of a slow burner, and also a red herring… the rest of the record is much more direct with the rousing hooks on Oh Say Do and – we kid you not – Newtown’s Flaming Laser Sword liable to roost in your brain for days.
Best of all is White Flag, rewarding the patience of those who stay with the album through to its final numbers, resembling a tidied up Mazes. In fact, alongside Mazes, and fellow Fat Cat signees, Milk Maid, we’re starting to wonder if this country has rediscovered its knack for producing quality scuzzy guitar pop? Let’s hope so.
But it doesn’t matter if this kind of music is coming from Wakefield or Washington State – Occam’s Razor is great, go have a listen to it.
Needless to say, we caught a word with the band last week…
Tell us about the recording of the album.
We recorded it predominantly live to tape using loads of vintage analogue gear. We did the live tracking in two days then did overdubs and stuff. Think it took us 10 days in total! It was my ideal way of recording really as it means the record sounds like us playing live and is pretty raw, but the production is still up to a really high standard because of how good Lee and Jamie at Greenmount Studios are and how good the set up there is. It sounds amazingly produced but still has the rough edges, which I really like. They’re the same reasons I love albums like In Utero and Pinkerton so much.
Who would you say your key influences are?
We love loads of stuff collectively however I’d say some of the key ones are Pavement, Pixies, Neutral Milk Hotel, early Weezer, The Microphones and stuff like that. Pavement are probably the main one that we all have in common and then Nirvana and Radiohead were massive influences on us as we were growing up. More recently I’d say East Coast bands like Algernon Cadwallader. A lot of that list is American, which I guess explains a lot about our sound. My favourite British band at the moment is probably Let’s Wrestle. We played a couple of gigs with them the other summer and they’re ace. Sam is a massive This Town Needs Guns fan too, who again probably sound more American. Basically I’ve always been more of a Shins guy than a Kooks guy.
Isn’t everyone? Will we see you live any time soon – north of the border perhaps?
We’re touring from the 7th-28th November but unfortunately we don’t have any Scottish dates. Hopefully we should make it up there early next year.
Who is Occam and why should we trust him with a razor???
Old Bill Ockham was a logician in the 14th century who really this idea of shaving away unnecessary theories. I reckon it’s a pretty trustworthy way to look at things and seemed to work well as a metaphor for a lot of the subject matter of the songs.
Wonderful. You’ll get those tour dates over at the Spills’ Bandcamp, along with the music. Have a listen to Summer Vibes below.
