Ten Years Later: Spirit Division - Spirit Division

While Spirit Division wasn’t my first serious band, it was the first that I formed with a fairly specific idea of what I wanted it to sound like. I always described what I was going for as “blues metal” with stuff like Danzig’s Lucifuge, Badlands, and Black Sabbath’s debut as primary reference points alongside stoner-doom flourishes rooted in Saint Vitus and Clutch among others. I’d also had my local Indy scene inspirations in groups like The Gates of Slumber, Devil to Pay, and Black Stone Ritual and seeing The Midnight Ghost Train when my old band Psychic Faith gigged with them in 2012 proved to be a huge catalyst.

Of course the vision wasn’t fully formed in 2013 and the next year and a half came with some awkward growing pains. I assumed bass and lead vocals with my Psychic Faith bandmate David on drums, having made up after a brief falling out when we split the year before, and Nightmares on Earth’s Brad Mohr as our original guitarist. We couldn’t tell if we should be a trio or quartet, cycling through a couple more guitarists that included yet another former PF member and playing gigs in both configurations, a couple of which I treasure and a couple that just might embarrass me for the rest of my life. We had a practice session with a keyboardist that didn’t catch on and I even contemplated if we could get a saxophonist on board, an idea much better realized with The Skyspeakers years later.

The songs we accrued were also the sort of hodgepodge you’d expect from a band still finding their way. A couple old Psychic Faith songs I had written the music for served as the foundation along with one we played but never actually recorded. A bunch of songs were written but discarded when they either fell flat at a gig, a guitarist would quit, or I decided to shelve something for a better fitting project down the road. Early versions of “Spirit Division,” “Through the Rounds,” and “Mountain of Lies” were included on our 2014 demo along with a couple experimental songs that fell to the wayside. In hindsight, it’s a far cry from how I delegate which songs will go to a particular project nowadays but there’s something to be said for the naivety of it.

Things changed dramatically for Spirit Division and arguably my life overall when guitarist/vocalist Stephen Hoffman came into the fold. A friend of mine in the scene recommended him and we hit it off when he came out to one of the house shows we put on at the time. I think he had a good idea of what we were trying to do, having his own one-man sludge project Swamp at the time, and him interning at a local recording studio gave us an in to see if we could start working on a proper album. The subsequent session resulted in a couple demo songs and an early version of “Disillusioned.” 

Those versions ultimately went unused but set the seeds for what would come. Dave and I offered our services in case Swamp ever needed live musicians but it ultimately ended up panning out the other way around; the two guitarists we had quit one after the other and from what I remember, Dave bumped into Stephen at an EyeHateGod show and asked if he wanted in. We wondered if we should still get a second guitarist to round things out but after another audition, it became clear that Stephen had the skills to hold it down on his own. His tone on the first two Spirit Division albums remains one of my favorites on anything I’ve done, his gravelly but still melodic voice was a great counter to my weirdo warbling, and the three songs we wrote with him on board felt like a new level. The blues metal trio was properly realized.

After a couple more gigs and fine-tuning tracks, we recorded the album at the Music Garage from October to December 2014 over the course of about four eight-hour sessions. The rhythm guitars, drums, and bass were all tracked live with overdubs for the lead guitar and vocals, generally managing to fully track three songs on a given day. For all the drama and uncertainty that had otherwise marked the year, the process surprisingly remains one of the smoothest I’ve ever had while recording an album. There were a couple debates and moments that brought out some limitations in our musicianship, but I really don’t remember any serious moments of conflict. We joked around, routinely went to the nearby Subway for our meal breaks, and doted on the engineer’s friendly little beagle. We even had a little extra time to track a demo for a song we hadn’t fully finished called “In Hell at Midnight,” later to become “A Dark Request” when we recorded it for 2016’s No Rapture.

And now the moment I’ve been waiting for (oh, you’re still here? Thanks!), I’d like to break down the eight songs that are included:

1) Spirit Division

Yep, I just had to follow the Black Sabbath example by starting the self-titled album off with the self-titled song! To be fair, I originally wrote it back in the Psychic Faith days with a more driving pace that I compared to Sabbath’s “Lady Evil.” Once I decided what I wanted this project’s direction to be, I adjusted it to the swing tempo seen here. I still love how fuzzy the bass sounds on this one and Stephen’s bluesy leads and backing chorus wails were cool touches. Even if the band stopped playing this song once the debut was out (more on that later), I still like this one a lot.

In hindsight, the misconceptions about what the name Spirit Division actually meant are amusing. I wrote the lyrics in college about the death of Hercules in Greek mythology and how his demigod status necessitated his soul separating from his body. Apparently some people thought it meant a branch of a company or something, which was how we got the Ghostbusters parody design that Kyle Messick made for our stickers and first shirt run. As somebody who thrives on multiple interpretations, I can’t be mad at that.

2) The Howler Leeches

This was one of the three songs that we put together around the time Stephen joined the band. While the darker mood was meant to dial into classic doom ala Saint Vitus and Pentagram, I actually came up with the riffs while dicking around with the rhythm of Primus’s “Too Many Puppies.” The lyrics were written about the stress of working various call center jobs when I first got out of college with the title lifted from a line in an Angry Beavers episode. Send more money, I’ll send more stuff!

It’s also blatantly clear that we didn’t record this to a click track. The tempo increasingly picks up speed over the course of the song, starting at a crawl and ending at a dash. It’s the sort of thing we noticed at the time but couldn’t properly address, ultimately deciding that it fit the escalating tension in the lyrics. It was one of the few from this era that we kept performing with the band’s later lineups and ended up sounding better; Jace’s fills were incredibly adept and I always loved the extra screams that Andy threw in.

3) Bloodletting

Stephen actually wrote the lion’s share of this song, which feels ironic considering how much of it is driven by the wah bass riff. The only part I directly wrote was the little trotting riff between the verses and might’ve suggested some structural arrangements. He also wrote the lyrics on this one; I never knew what they were about exactly but I still love how the grimy imagery was such a great contrast from what I was writing. I appreciate the collaboration that went into this one, it kinda foreshadows how we’d approach the writing for No Rapture and Forgotten Planet.

We played this one a couple more times after Stephen left the band, usually with me or Andy handling the vocals in his place. It was always his song and it felt good to perform with him again when we opened for Weedeater as a one-off quartet in 2017. I remember him telling me that he was impressed for how I could sing and play the riff at once. With how tricky the timing can be between them, I’m a bit impressed myself in hindsight.

4) Through The Rounds

This song might’ve been the most blatant about the blues metal idea. The riffs were inspired by a mix of Motörhead’s “One Short Life” and “No Lie” by King’s X, both tracks putting a similar sort of shuffle, while the lyrics were probably about as close as I’ll ever get to complete nonsense with it being an exercise of pulling out as many off-the-wall rhyming words as I could think of. Part of me feels like the band might’ve outgrown it in a sense by the time it was properly recorded, likely why it was another that we stopped playing live pretty quickly, but I still like it. Having Dave double my vocals also gave it a bawdy appeal.

In hindsight, there were a couple ideas we tried out and thought about during the demo process for this song that I wish we had put toward the album itself. The slide that Matt used for the leads on the demo was pretty cool and the gravelly voice I used for one of the lead vocals was a little nod to The Midnight Ghost Train. I also remember wanting to ask Chucky from Black Stone Ritual to put down some harmonica since I’d seen them use it on a couple songs but worried he’d consider us beneath him scene-wise; I kick myself a bit for not doing so.

5) Cloud Of Souls

This was another song from the Psychic Faith days and was even included on the Dead City Degenerates demo back in 2011. I decided to keep playing it with Spirit Division since the PF version didn’t have the weight I wanted and it was the one song on the demo that I wrote most of the music for anyway. As much as we’ve tossed around the idea of redoing some of the old Dead City material, I wouldn’t ever want to touch this one. As far as I’m concerned, this is the definitive version of “Cloud of Souls.”

As far as the track itself goes, it’s another that taps into more classic doom influence with Stephen’s touches giving it a stoner feel. The lyrics were about the ways that people come and go over the course of our lives and how that may play into a grander cosmic design, no doubt me trying to make sense of the moving around I did as a kid and the relationship changes I would come to experience as an adult. I was also this close to having Cloud Of Souls be the name of the band instead of Spirit Division, hence why I later used it as a moniker for the solo albums I put out in 2023 and 2024. The more you know, I guess.

6) Mountain Of Lies

This song had its roots in a jam session I had with Dave and Matt on my birthday in 2013 before either of them was fully in the band. I came up with a couple of the riffs and structured it out later with a prompt to only use a certain number of notes for it. We recorded it for the 2014 demo, during which Dave and I amused ourselves by trying to freestyle rap when we played back the recordings before tracking the vocals proper. In hindsight, it might’ve planted for my low key desire to see stoner-doom combined with hip hop. I don’t know why I’m like this…

While it ended up being another song where the speed ups are painfully obvious and there was a bit of pitch correction applied to a couple of my lines, it may have one of the most enduring Spirit Division songs with just about every lineup playing it. Matt could be prone to overplaying while Stephen handled the lead/rhythm balance with a lot of tasty licks. I also appreciated the creative fills that Jace put in when he played it. That combined with my lyrics about how nobody gives a shit about anything and you might as well just numb yourself to get through it made for some fun times.

7) Red Sky

If “Bloodletting” was the song that Stephen brought to the table, then “Red Sky” was very much Dave’s baby. He wrote the main riff and the lyrics while I edited some of the lines to make them easier to sing, came up with the verse riff (still feel like I cooked with this one), and Stephen and I coordinated the bridge. We also put in three layers of vocals with Dave putting in one and me contributing two with and without distortion. It apparently got so intense that you can hear some clipping toward the end of the song, which I just sort of accept as part of it at this point. While it was another that ended up not getting played live very much, it felt like another instance of our burgeoning collaborative spirit.

I wanted this song to be a colossal epic while we were writing it and might’ve been a bit dismayed when it turned out to *only* be six minutes long. It was on my bucket list for years to write a ten-minute long track and every time I felt like I came close to matching that, it turned out I would be about two or three minutes short. Granted this wasn’t an explicit problem as I wasn’t about to pad out a song’s runtime purely for the sake of fulfilling a metric and the attempts I’ve put in have come out to be some of my favorites even if they “failed” to reach this goal. Of course, this goal would ultimately be satisfied by two songs on 2024’s A Constant State of Flux so there’s that. All things considered, it turned out well.

8) Disillusioned

On the flip side, “Disllusioned” has always been my least favorite on this album. I don’t think it was necessarily anything wrong with the song itself so how it’s felt somewhat out of place with everything else on here. It was one of the earlier songs we wrote but none of the lineups ever seemed to truly gel with it, sometimes barely getting through it live. (I’ll never forget a show we played as the original trio where Brad’s amp started acting up during this song right as the full band was supposed to come back in) I think “Red Sky” also had so much closer energy that anything after it just felt superfluous. I wouldn’t necessarily say this song was a filler for how much work was still put into it, but I think it was primarily included so we wouldn’t end up with an album that’d be too short. Go figure No Rapture ended up being even shorter than this would’ve been without it…

However, there’s still plenty of things that I like about this one. I’ve always liked that bookending riff, sometimes I wonder if I should’ve put it toward something else but it works well here. The verses and choruses were inspired by Motörhead’s “Liar” and the bass bridge was a showoff point live as Dave’s claps could get some solid audience participation on a good night and the bass line could make for some tricky fun singing/playing. The lyrics also hit pretty good, especially since I had written the bulk of them as a high schooler in 2007. A couple of my friends said that this was their favorite song on the album so I ultimately don’t regret its inclusion.

Once the album was quickly mixed and mastered, we turned to figuring out the artwork. My initial idea was to have a nude woman standing in front of a large pyre, invoking shades of the original myth, and Dave even hired a model once to pose for the concept. However, it didn’t go too far as the idea felt tasteless. The real turn came with Sarah of Battersea designing a flyer for a house show our bands played together, impressing me so much that I asked her to design our cover. It turned out incredibly well, if a little more abstract than I initially expected, and I regret not following through on acquiring the original painting. With her currently drafting art for Lavaborne’s upcoming second album, Harbingers of Desolation, I’m looking forward to seeing how that will turn out. The more things change, amirite?

Spirit Division was released on a very modest scale, self-releasing a 100 CD run, and not having that many connections at the time meant my ideas of promoting it were premiering “Red Sky” and the title song as singles and sending it to some friends and a couple of the blogs that had covered the demo. I was pretty amped to see The Obelisk cover it in one of their Quarterly Reviews that year and it’s currently sitting at 75% with two reviews on the Metal Archives, the most qualitative measure of all. We also set up a release show to celebrate it, which ultimately proved to be the catalyst for yet another dramatic overhaul…

By the time the album was getting ready for release, things had gone sour with Dave. His lumbering style worked well enough with the songs we’d had but as Stephen and I started crafting riffs for future No Rapture songs, it became clear that his playing wouldn’t suit the tempo and rhythm changes we needed. However, that’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t have been as much of an issue had his personality not been so geared toward conflict and antagonism. Him getting kicked out of the band would also mean kicking him out of my house since he had lived with me at that time. I also strong-armed him into playing the release show before his full departure, a move he saw as coercion and that I saw as giving him a chance to go out with a bang. Considering he once seemed to be the only person who believed in me when I started Spirit Division, I wanted him to make us miss him.

At the end of the day, I’m still proud of what we accomplished with this album. It’s got some noticeable flaws and subsequent albums would be stronger in comparison, but it also turned out better than I had anticipated going in. It set the standard for how I have gone about debuting other projects, bringing enough song skeletons to offer something substantial while inviting people on who can enhance that material and pave the way for something even more effective down the line. Even if I wasn’t in the band, I’m pretty sure I’d still enjoy this for the combination of fuzz and catchiness as well as the snappy pacing. It’s very of the genre but I think it marked the start of something unique that I still stand by.

“All that matters within your time is what you manage to leave behind”