Baton Rouge oddballs SPLLIT make records that clatter and bleep like an arcade crammed with rowdy kids. The duo’s members, known simply as Urq and Marance, approach their tunes like madcap chemists tinkering with acidic formulas. On their debut release, 2019’s XX_HANDLE // SOAR THROAT, Urq and Marance split their duties down the middle; each member penned half of the LP, writing and recording their respective batch of songs in less than a day. On that project, they spotlit their distinct styles—Marance’s skewed art punk, Urq’s scuzzy garage rock—but their music’s wattage only intensifies when their powers are combined. SPLLIT’s impish new LP Infinite Hatch is packed with abstract verses, angular guitars, and an arsenal of animated squeaks and skronks.
In under 30 minutes, SPLLIT tear through 12 songs that range from heat-warped indie rock (“Bevy Slew”) to lippy new wave (“Growth Hacking”) to muted psychedelia (“Time Passing Dirge”). The band cites Captain Beefheart, the Fall, Deerhoof, and the Raincoats as inspirations, but you can also pick out traces of the Waitresses, Devo, and DRINKS, Cate Le Bon’s off-kilter duo with Tim Presley. On the wonky outlier “Curtain Lift,” they even recall Leisure-era Blur, slipping bent guitar riffs and hushed drumming under their most fluid vocal melody. But even with all of this input swirling around in their brains, SPLLIT shred and reassemble their influences rather than rubbing off carbon copies.
Infinite Hatch’s songs are built like scrappy, neon-flecked collages; some edges are torn, others cut into crisp corners. Their lyrics also can feel snipped from magazine copy and rearranged like effortless fridge-magnet poetry. On “Growth Hacking,” the product of a 45-minute songwriting exercise, Marance blurts out a string of seemingly unrelated words over squiggles of synth and pin-pricking guitar. “Hunch hard shake… change hack rake,” they sing in staccato bursts. The sheer sound of the words outweighs their possible meanings; their harsh consonants land like a heavy chain clunking to the floor, link by link.
While writing “Fast Acting Gel,” SPLLIT plucked random idiomatic phrases from the internet for lyrical inspiration. Marance rattles off clichés (“a dime a dozen,” “break a leg”) before decoding them (“something common,” “good luck”). The bluntness of Marance’s definitions makes everyday phrases feel like alien codes. “Shine Sheen” offers a less wordy look into the absurdity of language; amid high-pitched, cartoonish whizzes and digital crickets, SPLLIT refer to talking as a “speech reflex” that occurs despite a “mind body disconnect.” Lines like “Tip over a filing cabinet/Just to scatter all my regrets” only enhance the delightfully bizarre nature of SPLLIT’s dual braintrust. By inverting the mundane and poking around in its detritus, Urq and Marance create a strange haven of their own. It feels at once calculated and lovingly cobbled together.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
