Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building the L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. It's a role that, between managing a prolific release schedule and selecting producers out of what amounts to a little black book of underground dance misfits, requires a bit more creative agency than your average label head. Spit, Morelli's first music under his own name, appears hell-bent on separating the man from the hailstorm of narrative and praise surrounding his label. It arrives via Hospital Productions, 36 minutes of ill-at-ease industrial simmer whose length, construction, and tenor defy the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement that L.I.E.S. inspires.
There is nothing nice about Spit. The album title was inspired by a neighborhood Morelli lived in, one in which hookers would "smoke cigarettes, read the paper, talk on their cell phones, and spit. They would spit...a lot." So not just spit, but "hooker spit," which should give you a window into the tension, claustrophobia, and foulness that infect Morelli's music. Spit is dark, more so than the glut of industrial-leaning techno and eerie machine music Morelli has dug up for L.I.E.S. Those works often had expanse on their side: they're long, winding tracks that, however noisy, could engender mystery or psychedelic escape. Spit, in comparison, trudges through its eight tracks: fed up, exhausted, grim. When asked why he didn't release his album on his own label, he responded tersely: "Dom[inick Fernow, head of Hospital Productions] simply proposed I make a record for him. If he did not ask, then I would not have done it." Ok, then.
This sense of duty and drudgery comes to life on scraping, hissy tracks such as "Sledgehammer II" and "Slow Down". Ugly, metal-on-metal machine music, Spit is rhythmic in nature, but not as dance-oriented as much of the L.I.E.S. output. I don't think the tired, delayed claps and barely-there acid bassline of "Modern Paranoia" want to make anyone dance; they're exhausted, it was a long day, they need a beer and a shot. They're very much at home with the noir-ish menace of Hospital Productions-affiliated acts like Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant.
If you squint hard enough you can find some playfulness in Spit, in the way pitched toms hop around in the background of "Crack Microbes" or in "Director Of…"'s garbled, beatless trip. The album's centerpiece, in placement if not tone, is "Fake Rush", a nervy, light-on-its-feet stew of rhythmic oscillations. Were it not for its bit-reduced crunch and battery-acid exterior, "Fake Rush" could've come from one of London's many young bass manglers, especially as it clocks a heart-racing 140 bpm when it's not wandering around drunkenly in half-time.
It's hard to truly love an album that seems a constant threat to shiv you, though, and while Spit's economy prevents it from careening into pure aggression, it remains irritated throughout. This feels by design, and it's easy to read Spit as a reaction to all of the love poured on L.I.E.S. of late. More likely, Spit represents another of Morelli's inspirations, after several collaborative projects. (On the process of making the album, he offers, "[Y]ou’re working in a tried and true format and throwing your own shitty take on what has been done by the masters years ago.") There's enough on offer that its tone can be forgiven, perhaps, but there are going to be plenty of nights when Spit just wants to be left alone, and you'll be inclined to grant it as much.
