Spit (album)

Although bassist Talena Atfield (pictured) is on Spit's album cover, Tanya Candler played bass on the album.[1]

In September 1996,[2] after moving with her family from Brampton to London, Ontario, drummer Mercedes Lander decided that she wanted to form a band.[3] She began jamming with guitarist Fallon Bowman, whom she met in gym class, after they bonded over their shared interest in grunge artists such as Nirvana and Silverchair.[4][5] Mercedes soon brought in her sister, Morgan Lander, to jam with them as their singer and second guitarist.[6] Together, they would write an early version of "Brackish", the first Kittie song.[7]

In late 1997, Mercedes, Morgan and Bowman decided on naming themselves Kittie in order to sign up for an upcoming Battle of the Bands competition at Call the Office in London.[8] They chose the band name because it "seemed contradictory".[9] Morgan said: "Usually females are perceived as being cute, fragile and feminine, like the name Kittie. The contradiction comes in, when the listener hears what our music really is about: women playing metal".[10] At Bowman's suggestion, Kittie recruited Tanya Candler as their bass player to complete the band's lineup, in spite of the fact she had not played bass beforehand.[10][11] After making their live debut performing at Call the Office on February 28, 1998,[12] Kittie would play "over 200 some odd shows [...] [from] Toronto, to Detroit" before attracting record label interest, according to Mercedes.[13] After performing at Canadian Music Week festival in Toronto, Kittie approached Jake Weiner, second-in-command at Ng Records.[14] After watching them play live, Weiner signed Kittie into a four-album record deal with Ng.[15][16][nb 1]

According to Morgan Lander, the songs featured on Spit were all written when the members of Kittie "were 14 years old".[18] Kittie wrote and reworked its songs over the span of three years, from the moment the band formed until they went into record the album.[19][20] The band wrote the music first, as a "backdrop" to Morgan's vocals.[18] Originally based in grunge music, the band's sound would transition towards heavy metal on the back of recent releases from Korn, Deftones and Sepultura.[21] When asked about their influences in an interview with Metal Maidens in 1999, the members of Kittie cited Nile, Today Is the Day, Placebo, Far, Weezer, Orgy, Fear Factory, Hole, Tura Satana, Human Waste Project, Babes in Toyland, Misfits, Blondie, and Nasum as influences.[10]

After signing with Ng, Kittie recorded Spit with producer Garth Richardson at EMAC Studios in May 1999, in the space of nine days.[22][23] Richardson was introduced to Kittie after Robert Nation, EMAC's owner, gave him a copy of Kittie's self-titled demo EP (1998), and he had agreed to work with the band for a minimum fee before they had been signed to Ng.[10][24][25][20] The members of Kittie were still attending high school at the time, and recording sessions would take place in the evenings after they had dinner and finished their homework at the studio. According to Candler, they would finish recording at no later than 10pm per day.[25][26]

Prior to recording, Kittie told Richardson that they wanted Spit to sound "live and raw, yet still [possess] the quality of a professional, studio-produced recording", and the band spent an entire day choosing which equipment and amps from Richardson's array they wanted to play through.[20] Bowman said that the album's guitar sounds are simple, alternating between a "straightforward clean and dirty" sound; she would only use one guitar pedal on the entire album, an Ibanez Classic Phase.[20] The album's guitar tracks were recorded using one of the Richardson's custom guitars, which Kittie used because they felt that it was "really great, [and] really chunky sounding", according to Bowman.[20] "Brackish" was nearly left off of Spit due to problems surrounding its arrangements. The song would come into its own when the band recruited DJ Dave, a friend of Nation's, to add "some cool jungle" beats under the track.[16][27] Morgan wrote the song's chorus a week later. "I remember sitting on the floor in the vocal booth writing the lyrics down, it was right at the very tail-end, like, 'I have no idea what I'm going to say here. I'll just think of something.' "[16] The album's total recording costs were US$57,000, and it was completed in August 1999.[28][29]

Radio specialty shows and early press supported Spit before its release, and Kittie's profile increased following coverage of the band in Rolling Stone magazine and in an MTV News 1515 report.[29][52][53] The album was initially released on November 13, 1999, by Ng,[54] but its production was short-lived as Ng was absorbed into Artemis Records shortly after.[17][45] In September 1999, following the band's performance at the Big Day Off in Hartford, Connecticut, Candler abruptly left Kittie for personal reasons.[55][25] The band quickly recruited Talena Atfield to replace Candler, with Atfield being made to learn Kittie's entire setlist two weeks before a scheduled performance at the CMJ Music Festival in New York City, where a music video was filmed for the album's lead single, "Brackish".[56][16][nb 3] Spit was then reissued by Artemis on January 11, 2000, with different artwork and photographs, featuring pictures of Atfield in place of Candler.[16][40][34]

Spit was supported by two major singles, "Brackish" and "Charlotte". "Brackish", which had been receiving airplay from radio outlets since late 1999, was released as a single on the same day that Spit was re-released.[57][58] The song's music video premiered on MuchMusic the day of the single's release, and then premiered on MTV by first appearing on MTV's 120 Minutes on January 30, 2000.[59] "Brackish" continued to be played on MTV and was rotated on WAAF.[29][60] Kittie also made a few appearances on TV; the group performed "Brackish" live on Late Night With Conan O'Brien on February 23, 2000,[61] and were interviewed and performed on the talk show Later on May 31, 2000.[62] The single reached number 31 on Billboard's Active Rock chart.[63] On June 5, 2000, Kittie released "Charlotte" as the album's second single, which reached number 35 on the Active Rock chart.[63][64][65] The music video for "Charlotte", directed by Lisa Rubish,[66] was played constantly on MTV, being one of the most played music videos on MTV during July 2000.[67][68] Artemis also released two EPs in support of Spit; a four-track promotional EP featuring live versions (and respective radio edits) of the album's title track and "Suck" was serviced to radio stations on April 24, 2000,[69] and the Paperdoll EP, featuring a remix of Spit's song "Paperdoll" and some live tracks, was released on December 12, 2000.[70] The Paperdoll EP had sold 100,000 copies in the United States by December 2003.[71]

After Spit's release, Kittie toured with Slipknot and, on July 11, 2000, released the home video, Spit in Your Eye.[66] Kittie began an American tour on April 27, 2000, with Chevelle, Shuvel and the Step Kings. Kittie then toured Europe with Suicidal Tendencies and performed at Ozzfest 2000, headlining the second stage.[66][94] They were the youngest, and only female act, on that year's bill. Morgan and Mercedes said when they were having dinner with their parents back home in Canada, they received a phone call from the representative of Ozzfest, being asked if they were interested in performing at the tour, requesting a press kit to review. When touring in England, Kittie received a phone call being told the band is officially involved in the tour.[95] Kittie planned to tour with Pantera, but the tour fell through when Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo fell and broke two ribs. After the Pantera tour fell through, Kittie created a headlining tour[96] and performed at the 2001 SnoCore festival.[97]

In spite of the success of Spit, the members of Kittie never received any of its royalties from Artemis, and the band's relationship with the label began to decline during their tours in support of the album.[71][98][99] In May 2000, Artemis allegedly tried to pressure Morgan to begin recording a new Kittie album in September 2000; the band did not want to, because they didn't feel that they were finished touring in support of Spit.[98][100] In June 2000, Artemis pulled Kittie's touring support following a change in representation at the label, prompting the band to start self-financing and self-managing their own tours.[101] Kittie would also accuse Artemis of trying to get their talent agent to not book any more shows for them, in an attempt to starve the band financially so that they would return to the studio.[98]

In April 2003, Kittie filed a lawsuit against Artemis over eleven breaches of contract, after they discovered via an audit that they were owed US$900,000 in royalties from the label, who had "fucked with the books" to prevent Kittie from recouping.[71][99] This included Artemis charging Kittie three times for the "Charlotte" music video.[71] The dispute was settled out of court in March 2004.[102] Additionally, Richardson (who also sued Artemis)[99] would later claim that Artemis had paid him US$60,000 in the album's royalties, but that he was owed another US$320,000; he attributed this to the decline of record labels in the 2000s due to "the whole downloading situation", and his negative experiences with Artemis would lead him to be more responsible when seeking out bands to produce in the future.[103]

Leading up to and following Spit's release, press attention towards Kittie became more focused on the members' ages and their anomalous status as an all-female band playing heavy metal than their musical output.[43][16][105] The members of Kittie said that they did not want to be described as a "girl metal" band, but as a heavy metal band instead. Mercedes said: "You don't call Machine Head a 'boy metal band'. You call them a metal band. Why should they make an exception [for us] just because of the gender? It's almost the exact same kind of music, except we don't have penises".[44] Several media outlets presented the band as an antithesis to pop music and particularly to that of Britney Spears, leading them to be dubbed "anti-Britney",[43][57][61] despite the fact they had never said anything negative about Spears themselves.[31][106] In an interview with The Washington Post, Morgan said: "I'm not up there singing, 'Hit me baby, one more time!' We're a lot more mature than that ... We didn't slag her, and we respect her... We just don't want to be her!".[31] Mercedes felt that most of the press attention surrounding Kittie and Spit was "the wrong kind of press" because journalists had not properly researched the band before writing about them;[107] she also claimed that Artemis had revealed the ages of Kittie's members to the press against their wishes.[108]

Kittie's struggle to gain acceptance within the male-dominated heavy metal scene following the release of Spit would directly affect the band's subsequent musical direction and output.[16][109] The band's next two albums, Oracle (2001) and Until the End (2004), saw the band consciously move away from the nu metal stylings of Spit towards an more aggressive sound that was generally categorized as death metal,[16][110][111] largely under the direction of Morgan Lander.[112] Kittie also began gradually omitting songs from the album from their setlists, as the band "wanted people to see who we are now and what we have accomplished since then", according to Morgan Lander.[113][114] However, neither album would match the critical or popular acclaim of Spit,[16][115][116][117] and the band later expressed dissatisfaction at the writing and tone of both albums.[118][119] Speaking with Revolver in 2007, Mercedes stated: "When we did [Spit], everything was fresh and we were so excited. Then came the pressure to succeed, and over the next two records we fell out of love with music and the excitement of songwriting."[109]

Spit made Kittie into one of a few all-female, and/or female-fronted, nu metal bands to achieve notable success,[120][121] and the album has retrospectively been noted for its significance in representing, and subverting gender expectations for, women in heavy metal.[16][114][115] Later assessments of album have also been more positive, and it has since appeared on several best-of lists for the nu metal genre.[122] "Brackish" appeared on Fuse's "19 Best Nu-Metal Hits of All Time" list in 2015,[33] and was ranked number 23 on Spin's "30 Best Nu Metal Songs" list in 2017.[123] In March 2023, Rolling Stone ranked the album's title track at number 82 on their list of "The 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time", calling the song "a murderously heavy proto-feminist anthem that takes aim at misogynists and lands a kill shot in under three minutes."[124][125]

All tracks are written by Morgan Lander, Mercedes Lander, Tanya Candler, and Fallon Bowman.[130]

Adapted from Spit's liner notes.[23]

Citations

• "Hear Them Roar: An Interview With Kittie". DrDrew.com. Archived from the original on December 16, 2000.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
• "Hear Them Roar". Los Angeles Times. August 31, 2000.