Baton Rouge oddballs SPLLIT make data that clatter and bleep like an arcade full of rowdy children. The duo’s members, recognized merely as Urq and Marance, strategy their tunes like madcap chemists tinkering with acidic formulation. On their debut launch, 2019’s XX_HANDLE // SOAR THROAT, Urq and Marance cut up their duties down the center; every member penned half of the LP, writing and recording their respective batch of songs in lower than a day. On that undertaking, they spotlit their distinct kinds—Marance’s skewed artwork punk, Urq’s scuzzy storage rock—however their music’s wattage solely intensifies when their powers are mixed. SPLLIT’s impish new LP Infinite Hatch is filled with summary verses, angular guitars, and an arsenal of animated squeaks and skronks.
In below half-hour, SPLLIT tear by 12 songs that vary from heat-warped indie rock (“Bevy Slew”) to lippy new wave (“Progress Hacking”) to muted psychedelia (“Time Passing Dirge”). The band cites Captain Beefheart, the Fall, Deerhoof, and the Raincoats as inspirations, however you can too pick traces of the Waitresses, Devo, and DRINKS, Cate Le Bon’s off-kilter duo with Tim Presley. On the wonky outlier “Curtain Elevate,” they even recall Leisure-era Blur, slipping bent guitar riffs and hushed drumming below their most fluid vocal melody. However even with all of this enter swirling round of their brains, SPLLIT shred and reassemble their influences moderately than rubbing off carbon copies.
Infinite Hatch’s songs are constructed like scrappy, neon-flecked collages; some edges are torn, others minimize into crisp corners. Their lyrics can also really feel snipped from journal copy and rearranged like easy fridge-magnet poetry. On “Progress Hacking,” the product of a 45-minute songwriting train, Marance blurts out a string of seemingly unrelated phrases over squiggles of synth and pin-pricking guitar. “Hunch laborious shake… change hack rake,” they sing in staccato bursts. The sheer sound of the phrases outweighs their potential meanings; their harsh consonants land like a heavy chain clunking to the ground, hyperlink by hyperlink.
Whereas writing “Quick Performing Gel,” SPLLIT plucked random idiomatic phrases from the web for lyrical inspiration. Marance rattles off clichés (“a dime a dozen,” “break a leg”) earlier than decoding them (“one thing frequent,” “good luck”). The bluntness of Marance’s definitions makes on a regular basis phrases really feel like alien codes. “Shine Sheen” presents a much less wordy look into the absurdity of language; amid high-pitched, cartoonish whizzes and digital crickets, SPLLIT seek advice from speaking as a “speech reflex” that happens regardless of a “thoughts physique disconnect.” Traces like “Tip over a submitting cupboard/Simply to scatter all my regrets” solely improve the delightfully weird nature of SPLLIT’s twin braintrust. By inverting the mundane and poking round in its detritus, Urq and Marance create an odd haven of their very own. It feels without delay calculated and lovingly cobbled collectively.
