Review: Spider Kitten ‘God Don’t Sleep’
Spider Kitten. A puzzle wrapped in a conundrum. A contradictory battle with experimentation, mental health, and a refusal to sit still powers the trio of guitarist/frontman Chi Lameo, drummer Chris West, and bassist Rob Davies to constantly build up and tear down expectations in a search for musical catharsis. At this point, the Newport trio are an ever-shifting entity that produces a myriad of music at a rate that few can dream of.
For all their dalliances, it is their terrifying 2016 concept album Ark Of Octofelis that is a staggering high point in their career, albeit one that was as taxing on the band as it was the listener. The thing with Spider Kitten is that you never know what you are going to get. After turns that have included country, ’90s grunge-influenced alternative rock, and Americana, with their latest album, God Don’t Sleep, they have taken an unusual step and returned, at least in part, to the scene of the crime.
To appreciate their latest opus slightly better, you need to understand Ark… in the original story. The fictional band took America by storm and inspired a cult-like following to build them an interstellar craft they, and their devotees, would depart on. However, the night before the planned trip, the band snuck aboard and left them all behind.
God Don’t Sleep arrives like a wormhole in time, transporting the listener back to 1976 – the moment the band stop blinking into the LA sunshine, ready to take the world by storm before the angst of the storied ending. This extends even to the packaging, where the band have produced their own elaborate, immersive fictional support for the narrative, including in-character band photos and a period piece reporting on their Beatles-like explosion onto the scene. You can simply listen to this album as a piece of music, or you can view the whole thing through the lens of the story.
Leaving all that to one side for now and getting down to brass tacks on the music: Spider Kitten have existed in a weird place musically for a long time. Too quirky to be pigeonholed, too mutable to produce the same thing with any degree of consistency, there are times when the need for evolution has felt like both a strength and a crutch. It is an uphill task to keep pace with the ideas that flow from this incredibly prolific act.
Occupying the same world as Ark…, the latest album rubs shoulders with the apocalyptic doom sound, although perhaps less nihilistic than the 2016 original. Best Guess Hotel opens the album with muted Eastern flavourings before becoming a cascading, chaotic verse with those trademark Alice in Chains-like harmonies and a woozy sense of creeping madness.
Over the tumbling riffs and deliberate stabs of the bass from Davies, the vocals whisper and chatter over each other like multiple personalities simultaneously finding common ground and bickering. It is infectious yet disturbing with an underlying sense of danger, as if it all might come apart at any moment – which, if you follow the story, is exactly where we’re heading.
slowly turning a vice and crushing you with the gravitational weight of a black hole…
The Calver brings calm and quiet to start with, featuring barely strummed notes and lingering sounds until thick, elastic bends from Chi Lameo ring out and authoritative stamps of the drums from West turn the track into a languid, spaced-out piece of suffocating doom. The pleading, drawn-out vocals, drenched in effects, are a cry from another world, feeling like radio static while walls of riffs fall like pieces of a glacier. Scratching feedback breaks the smooth flow as quiet/loud dynamics begin to strangle the mood.
Single Fast Queen comes out of the ambient, drifting end of the previous song to smack you in the face with a bullish, punk-tinged speed rush that has echoes of moments from their 2021 album Major Label Debut. West leads the vocal charge with coarse hollering on the verses before the harmony-drenched chorus sweetens the pot. Featuring a delicious, smoky bass-led breakdown, this is a foot-to-the-gas stoner rock joyride through territory the band haven’t visited for a while.
Menacing chanting and a nagging refrain start Losers & Fools as the story begins to take a darker twist. Calling back to Ark…, the sinister chanting is backed by creeping feedback and heavy psych rock. This time around, Davies trades vocals with Lameo, maintaining that Staley/Cantrell influence that has set Spider Kitten apart from their peers. The exotic feel of the winding solo helps create a sense of tension and unease as the narcissistic (in-story) outfit begin to make promises they will never keep.
The monstrous twenty-minute title track brings the album to a head. Dense atmospherics and softly crooned vocals whisper madness into your brain, which does little to prepare you for the fuzzed-out hammer blow of the sludge riffing to come. Long and drawn out, the band move through phases, building to peaks and then falling back to tease out new directions. The bruising, rolling riff and nightmarish melodies that appear halfway feel like they are slowly turning a vice and crushing you with the gravitational weight of a black hole, before they release the pressure with a glorious guitar run. It’s moments like those that make Spider Kitten so special.
Fortunately for the uninitiated, while listening to God Don’t Sleep, you don’t have to be aware of the story, mythos, or even the record it connects to in order to surrender to its pull. Spider Kitten’s latest release continues their doom resurgence and proves once again that while they may not be coming to a town near you any time soon, you should build a spaceship just in case they do.
Label: APF Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Mark Hunt-Bryden
