SPICE - VIV
SPICE are an American post-hardcore band formed in 2018 from members of post-punk/hardcore greats Ceremony and Creative Adult.
The announcement of a side-project from your favourite band can elicit a number of responses ranging from a defeatist groan (“Why can’t they just record a new album with their main band?”) to ecstatic delusion (“Lightning always strikes twice!”)
With their sophomore record, VIV, the correct response is still yet to be seen.
VIV opens with a certified banger. ‘Recovery’ is everything you want from a post-hardcore band riding the PMA (positive-mental-attitude) wave reignited by bands like Turnstile and Ceremony. Raucous, roomy drums groove beneath tight, glittery guitars that drive in perfect harmony with Ross Farrar’s vocals. Farrar notably seems to have split the influences of his first and most popular band, Ceremony, down the middle with SPICE and his other side-project, Crisis Man. Where Crisis Man takes the aggressive punk influences of Black Flag and Dead Kennedys, SPICE takes the more mellow and euphoric post-rock influences of Ceremony to heart, such as Lungfish and even, what sounds like at times, Guided by Voices.
It can sometimes be difficult to take side-projects as seriously as the bands they branch off from - it’s easy to think of them as pet projects rather than a fully realised band with a vision and a definable sound separate from their mother-bands. It can also be easy to predict that a new supergroup will somehow end up as being better than the sum of its parts.
While VIV, and the band’s debut self-titled record, are solid albums worth listening to for any post-rock/post-hardcore fan, or indeed any Ceremony or Creative Adult fan, at times the band seem to slip into their old ways and struggle to set themselves apart from their other, more successful, bands. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, VIV is a great album full of brilliant moments of clarity, tension, and euphoric release.
While VIV might not be a ‘no-skip’ record, there are some great tracks that make it stand out. ‘Any Day Now’ is a joyous post-hardcore bop with warring guitars and drums that makes you want to stage dive, whereas ‘Melody Drive’ is an atmospheric nothing-track that could be mistaken for listening to the band tune up in-between songs during a long rehearsal.
The same can be said for the lyrics on VIV. While, at times, it definitely helps to have a vocalist and lyricist with an MFA in Poetry from Syracuse University (Ross Farrar), you could also be forgiven for thinking that it could be someone's first time writing lyrics for a band and they just got lucky on some tracks. ‘Ashes in the Birdbath’ is a beautiful song about losing friends and living without them. On the bridge, Farrar sings “magic is real and death is so feral”, a brilliantly formulated line suggestive of the immeasurable love we can feel for those we have lost and the intangible violence of living without them. However on the track directly afterwards, ‘Threnody’, Farrar sings the absolute clanger “it wasn’t you, it wasn’t me, it was us, we were so messed up”.
Another stand out track is ‘Dining Out’. For an album that revolves around losing loved ones, Farrar’s refrain of “Life’s too long” cutting over the thumping bass and twinkling guitars puts paradox and balance at the forefront of the music. The rhythm section wouldn’t be out of place on a Joy Division record, and the guitars not out of place on something by The Strokes.
SPICE are a band finding themselves between two extremes: joy and depression. The songs where this dichotomy is put front and centre are where the band shine the brightest, like the closing track ‘Climbing Down the Ladder’, where delicate and, what sounds like, digitally altered violins clamour against hammering drums and distorted guitars in a battle for melody over rhythm.
VIV is an album born out of pain, hence the bands tagline and instagram handle “SPICE IS PAIN”. That pain is duly felt on VIV in powerful and emotive ways, however the true cathartic experience of that pain, or true empathetic response to that pain, is hampered by the band's struggle to produce a cohesive record that finds the key to truly unlocking that feeling. It’s no easy task, and not one that many bands can conquer, but for the post-rock, post-punk, and post-hardcore inclined, this album gets close enough.
Adam Blackwell
★★★☆☆