spiritual cramp
[Photo by Adam Brioza]

Meet Spiritual Cramp, the "hard mod" band born out of the Bay Area hardcore scene

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All punk bands owe a lot to the Ramones, but Spiritual Cramp vocalist Michael Bingham is very specific about what they owe to the Ramones. “You know the cover of Subterranean Jungle? That’s what our band is supposed to sound like,” he says.

That sleeve photo found Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky assembled on a subway train that had been tagged to hell, its battered metal shell framing the usual assemblage of drainpipe jeans, leather jackets, and white Nikes that have been around the block. It spoke to the buzz of a city, nights that can go one way or another, and a gritty, outsized sense of style. It’s exactly the sort of thing that chimes with musicians who care about how their work is delivered.

Read more: How Philadelphia Became an Epicenter for Rock Music in the U.S.

“I’m very cognizant of the way that I present myself because I want to convey a message without having to speak,” Bingham observes, his wild, sandy hair swept towards heavy, black-rimmed glasses and an orange-on-black GBH tee. “I want to step into a room and have people look at me and be able to get a read of what I’m about. When our band steps on stage, I want that conversation to be had with the whole crowd.”

Spiritual Cramp — completed by guitarists Stewart Kuhlo and Jacob Breeze, bassist Mike Fenton, Max Wickham on tambourine, and Blaine Patrick on drums — weaves together disparate punk strands into a furiously cool whole. The group, named after a Christian Death song, sounds like the Marked Men and the Specials locked in a death spiral, with a Lambretta scooter and a pair of low-cut oxblood Doc Martens plummeting into the abyss alongside them. Their outsized live energy, meanwhile, is all hardcore. 

Bingham has gone for “hard mod” as a descriptor in the past and it’s as good a catch-all, as you might muster for the fizzing songs that make up their sole full-length, Television, and a scattered run of EPs. “The Nerve Agents wore Harrington jackets, had mod haircuts, and they wore make-up, but they would still beat you up,” he says.

Bingham is speaking today from his home in Los Angeles, but Spiritual Cramp’s rise occurred in San Francisco, adjacent to the savage, unstoppable Bay Area hardcore scene. Members have rotated through bands such as Scalped, Fentanyl, No Reality, and Primal Rite, but here they’re delving into their collective past, uncovering influences that have been there since Bingham was a kid stealing CDs from a Fred Meyer in Vancouver, Washington. 

“That’s the thing: We were punks before we were hardcore kids. I’ve been into the Specials since I was 16-years-old,” he says. “But it never occurred to me that I could do a project that’s crazy enough to play some music where those influences actually trickle over.”

When Spiritual Cramp started out, Bingham was intimidated by the demos presented to him by Fenton, with whom he’d previously worked with in the post-punk band Creative Adult and a number of other outlets. The songs were built around upstrokes, and a couple of steps removed from two-tone ska. The pair had developed a level of trust, though, that allowed them to be processed alongside their other preoccupations, which is where the Clash-esque dub, ripping garage-rock, and barked proto-hardcore sounds come in. 

“We’ve written music together for 15 years,” Bingham says. “While we’ve been doing punk and hardcore music, [Fenton] also has another life of actively being involved in the reggae scene. And not even the skinhead reggae scene, that’s me. He basically constructs all of the reggae music, and then he passes it to me, but that reggae filter for me is not necessarily his same filter.”

If this sounds a little like flicking through record bins on a lazy weekday afternoon, Bingham’s lyrics provide a sharp sense of immediacy. His approach is straightforward, offering up scenes and sounds from his life in the city — cop sirens, helicopters, broken bottles, graffiti, fighting, staying out late — alongside ruminations on self-esteem, gentrification, and loneliness that pull from lived experience. 

Take “I Feel Bad Bein’ Me,” from the band’s Police State EP. Over guitar stabs that owe their life to the Clash’s London Calling, Bingham lays bare the difference between how he wants to be seen, and how he views himself. “I want to come on like an earthquake/Instead I come on like a headache,” he sings. “If you read the lyrics, it’s crazy,” he says. “It’s like, ‘That’s what I think about myself sometimes?’ And that one is a hit, you know?”

“I just say things so directly,” he adds. “I wish that I could say things a little sweeter, or with a little more pepper, but I can’t. I wrote some lyrics the other day, like, ‘Wake up in the morning, and the sun’s so bright. I’m gonna gouge out my eyes.’ That’s not poetic.”

It’s truthful, though. And it goes hard, which is kind of the point. Spiritual Cramp have a new record in the works and songs piling up, leaving Bingham with more grit and misery to work out in the vocal booth. “The most important thing is writing hot tracks, but we’re good at that,” he says, his confidence not even a little misplaced. “At the same time, I want to convey every message possible with our band. I want all of the artwork to be a certain way, I want to look a certain way, I want to smell a certain way.”