If you’ve ever set your watch 10 minutes ahead to trick yourself into gaining extra time, ‘Spat Out’ is the moment you 100% relate. Painfully aware of the unease each passing second can bring, Manchester’s most raucous jam-band Chew Magna are serving up a frenzied guitar rush of realisation that whether we like it or not, time waits for no one. “It’s fuelled by the frustration of being up against time, of the fleetingness of life whilst having this nagging feeling of missed opportunities,” tells the band’s singer Laurie, of the track’s inspiration.
Arriving just as the 4-piece set their tour bus wheels in motion and for the first time, played a show in the town of their own namesake, ‘Spat Out’ chimes from the epicentre of the band’s own Venn diagram where Broken Social Scene and latter day Sonic Youth meet. From the moment the drums tick-tock a clockwork beat before giving way to smashing cymbals and a driven guitar melody of New Order momentum, Chew Magna’s distinct knack for possessing a playful energy screws with structure once more, as an instrumental ‘chorus’ of wild tuning seamlessly blends genres and Laurie calls; “You’re minds made – you always think you’re right”.
Taken from the band’s forthcoming self-titled debut album which explores themes of wasting potential, ‘Spat Out’ delves even deeper into the band’s poetic and philosophical fascinations as its inspiration and humour is drawn from one of Laurie’s own poems he reads out during the guitar solo/chorus of ‘Spat Out’. The title entitled Home Economics imagines an inverse world where everyone ‘makes it’ in a band and only the lucky few live out their pipedreams of office jobs, orderly houses and secure savings. (“The truth is there are those who are born to do it, those who die at 27 having taken kitchen cupboard management to dizzying new heights. For everyone else it’s a roll of the dice,” its words quip).
‘Spat Out’ is also a song of collaboration; fellow Mancs, Dutch Uncles have remixed it for the flip and the track lands with a Hanna-Barbera meets Salvador Dali graphic novel style video featuring the whip-smart animated illustrations of fellow musician and long-time pal Andrew Rowley (Black Hulled Ships). Blasting off in their rocket Chew Magna become tangled in gravity’s embrace before being sucked in and spat out to a peach-coloured desert land which looks uncannily like the colourful vista of the single artwork by talented landscape artist Josh Sowa. Time’s crazy clock face catches up with them in a place where they could be stuck forever, growing old… are the seconds running away with them or will they make each one count? Only Time will tell.
Forming from the foundations of some of their home city’s various musical outfits, Chew Magna is guitarist and vocalist, Laurie Hulme (Songs For Walter), guitarist, Simon Walker (Young British Artists), drummer, Ben Philips (Young British Artists) and bassist, Joel Nicholson (Jane Weaver, Francis Lung). As their music resonates in the ears of all from Record of The Day to Amazing Radio, Chew Magna continue to absorb influences from the world around them and spit out their own alt-rock antidote to lifelessness in the modern age. Navigating new sonic terrains in the former furniture warehouse where they rehearse, their songs emerge from spontaneous instrumentals and are powered by boundless imagination to capture the raw emotion of live performance.
