by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
On grim days amid grim weeks we’re increasingly grateful for incredible bands like SPLLIT, whose music is capable of transportation far beyond this world. The Baton Rouge duo are grounded in our reality but you’d hardly know it listening to their music, the layered kaleidoscope of punk and art pop swirling toward alien terrain. Their second album, Infinite Hatch, due for release on October 27th via Feel It Records (Erik Nervous, Citric Dummies, Why Bother?) is a major statement of a record, the duo of Marance and Urq showing incredible growth while remaining true to their sound and vision. One of the year’s more exciting albums, each song a piece of the greater whole, capturing the band’s acidic knack for unlikely melodies together with their immaculate sense of personality. With layers and layers of MIDI squiggles and chiming harmonies, SPLLIT’s rubbery songwriting is triumphantly weird but undeniably captivating.
Follow lead single “Gemini Moods (Return)” (which we wrote a bit about in a recent “Fuzzy Meadows” column), SPLLIT offer another side of the Infinite Hatch with the brilliant and magnetic “Bevy Slew”. With a steady but dazzling rhythm, cosmic harmonies, and a mesmerizing focus, the band enter a portal of indefinite groove. The melody feels warped and bubbling but while subtly tangled, Marance and Urq’s duel vocals have the ability to make the song feel at ease. As the rhythm works to scramble reality, the band play it cool, this is major art rock dexterity delivered with a calming wink. SPLLIT let it unravel with perfection, eventually stuttering into a half time version that would sound like a tape glitch if it wasn’t executed with such grace. They slip and slide with intention, the shimmering melodic flourish the glue that holds it all together. It’s a reason to keep holding on.