I’m at a Northampton midday cafe so quiet it’s like a private office. There’s one guy in the corner silently studying a laptop, some brightly lit and lonely pastries, me and Spirit Ghost.
Well, two of the four members of the Amherst indie band: founder/singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Alex Whitelaw and drummer Stephen Kerr. (Lead guitarist Mike Cozzo and bassist Andrew Wang had to be elsewhere on the weekday workday.)
Spirit Ghost has a big show at Northampton’s Iron Horse on the horizon, on Thursday, April 14 at 10 p.m. Opening the show is fellow Amherst indie group Calico Blue.
It’s the kickoff concert for Spirit Ghost’s spring tour, which will find the foursome climbing into Wang’s SUV and heading out to Illinois to do a session for the highly respected Daytrotter website, playing shows on the way out and back. It will be the furthest west the band has traveled so far and Whitelaw booked the entire thing by himself (with help from DoDIY.org, a treasure trove of information for independent musicians worldwide).
Their sound is reverb-drenched rock with a love of garage and surf textures. Whitelaw mentioned Beach Fossils, Beach House and The Kinks as influences, and found a kindred spirit when he discovered California group The Growlers.
Originally Spirit Ghost was called Sexy Girls (the name change happened last fall) and started as a one-man band, with Whitelaw playing all the instruments on homemade recordings. Eventually he wanted to perform with musicians for live shows, so he put up a Craigslist ad.
“I had no other alternative,” Whitelaw said. “I didn’t have a lot of connections, I was too nervous to talk to anybody, so I figured a Craigslist ad would be the most direct way. And I got really lucky.”
Kerr, at the time a student in the music program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was looking to play more music and saw Whitelaw’s online listing; before long, the two joined forces and become friends.
Whitelaw still writes all the music himself, using a “[crappy] little interface” at home to record demos, which he then sends around for his bandmates to learn. “I bust out all the parts to the song, because I know how I want them to sound, or what kind of song I want to write,” he said. “I make it as quick as I can, bang it out in one sitting, so I don’t lose what it is i’m trying to make. And then I usually babble nonsense over it to get the melody.”
Often, Whitelaw says, when he’s showing the parts to other people, he tells them, “Sorry, I know it’s so stupidly simple, but for the good of the song, I swear to you, it works.”
But, Kerr added, “The songs are very melodic. If you stripped them down to just playing acoustic guitar and singing them, they still have a lot of merit.”
Whitelaw said he likes big soundscapes, and the watery, spacious sound of reverb helps create that atmosphere. “A simple yelp ripples and expands and fills up the tracks in a way that I find hypnotic. I just really dig it.”
The band leads off its 2015 “Kicking Gravestones” EP with “Broken Glass Kids,” which has a Vampire Weekend-esque hiccuping energy and a hyper, catchy little lead guitar line. When Whitelaw scrapes the side of his pick down the strings, the reverb makes it sound like some kind of alien communication.
Last September, Spirit Ghost recorded another EP’s worth of music at a Converse Rubber Tracks session, done at the shoe company’s headquarters in Boston. “They give you eight hours and an engineer and it’s up to you what you do with that time,” Whitelaw said.
“The CEO likes supporting independent music, so he had a studio built, and then they started this project of inviting bands to come in and use the studio time,” Kerr said.
“And they gave us free sneakers,” Whitelaw added, kinking his foot to show off his kicks. “I think it’s pretty crazy. But they get promotion, they get cool bands wearing their shoes.”
The Converse session was the band’s first to feature its full current lineup and they’re still deciding what to do with the recordings. The songs might come out as an EP in the summer, with a full new album to follow, which they’ll record by themselves.
“The more control we have, the better,” Kerr said.
Ken Maiuri can be reached at clublandcolumn@gazettenet.com.