The story of Freezing Hands’ “Ghouls of 22nd Street” involves a moment of self-correction outside of a Tucson Walgreens.
“There were a bunch of folks outside that were creepy crawling the place,” said Travis Spillers, frontman and guitarist of Tucson indie band Freezing Hands, in company with Matt Rendon (drums/vocals), Scott Landrum (Keys/vocals) and Kevin Conklin (bass). “And initially I was like, ‘Oh man, those are the ghouls of 22nd Street,’ which is really dehumanizing to these poor folks that are without home, hanging out outside the Walgreens, begging for change.”
“That’s a really shitty thing for me to be thinking. You know who the real ghouls are? The ghouls to me are are the owners of the Walgreens that are blaring out classical music at volume 11, and kicking the poor homeless off of the fucking curb.”
The compassionless, empathy-dry “shitheads of the world” are those called out in the title and title track of the band’s recent album. These figures are a theme throughout the LP, but also throughout the work of Freezing Hands, which always preserves an underlying current of disdain for the world’s ugliness.
The runner-up title for the album was “Burritos Near Me,” an homage to the band’s most frequent Google search during practices. The two titles are characteristic of Freezing Hands’ creative process, a method similar to that of testing al dente noodles: throwing things at the wall, or, as Spillers puts it: “screwing around.” The band came together in 2012, when Spillers and multi-instrumentalist Matt Rendon, who’d played together in the Knockout Pills and several other projects, began recording songs in the “Coma Cave,” a studio Rendon had built in his parents’ house. Spillers, a Bookmans employee then, invited friends and collaborators Jeremy Schliewe and Scott Landrum into the mix, and they cohabitated long enough to form a common law band.
“They stuck around,” Spillers said, “and we’re like, ‘alright, I guess we’re a band now.’”
To this day, Freezing Hands records at Rendon’s Midtown Island Studio. The studio operates as a bona fide record label, and has released projects from a plethora of acts including Lenguas Largas and Rendon’s own The Resonars. The musician and producer is largely responsible for Freezing Hands’ vintage sound, achieved through analog recording techniques, namely, ADAT tape machines.
The magic of Freezing Hands lies in Wednesday evenings, when the band comes together to hang out over beers, listen to records, and play music. Spillers arrives often wielding some hazy idea, and by the end of the night the four have a fleshed out song, the genre of which is not a concern. The frontman describes the group as “four guys with four relatively eclectic tastes” who, during laborious van stretches on a recent midwest tour, never threw on the same album twice. While labeled often as a power-pop outfit, the audience of a Freezing Hands live show might hear anything from country, to bossa nova, to no wave.
“We don’t give a shit what anyone thinks. We’re gonna make this and let the cards fall where they may,” Spillers said. “Which tends to alienate audiences sometimes. And that’s fine.”
The patchwork of influences is apparent on “Ghouls of 22nd Street.” While these 11 tunes come together into a coherent whole (due in part to Rendon’s consistent production), each song is sonically and lyrically singular. On the title track, where Spillers sings of those who “wouldn’t dish a lump of coal” to their fellow man, the band pulls from Afro-Brazilian rhythms and sounds.
“We certainly listen to a lot of Brazilian music,” the frontman said. “We have been for a number of years. That’s something we like to explore quite a bit, Os Mutantes and all the way up to Gilberto Gil, and those kinds of things.”
On “The Wafer,” the band shifts gears to swirling, effect-forward guitars and psychedelic falsettos. The track is an example of Spillers’ efforts to dial into the pedal stylings of guitarist John McGeoch (Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees), and features a standout, laid back vocal performance that brings to mind The Shins’ James Mercer.
These songs appear on side one of “Ghouls of 22nd Street,” which is a sort of two-chapter album that Spillers dreamt up while the band was working on its fourth record, 2023’s “Empty the Tank.”
“I had started trying to work on a kind of conceptual piece,” Spillers said, “in a very generic sense, just about the meek inheriting the earth.”
Spillers toyed with this idea for a number of months, as he penned the lyrics that would eventually populate side one of the album. What resulted was a five-song “suite for the effete,” an ode to the long-suffering “shat upon” of the world, and in some ways, Spillers explained, a “baseball bat to masculinity.”
The first side closes with “The Meek and the Mild,” a serene acoustic tune, complete with classic folk harmonies and subtle, atmospheric keys. Though marking the end of this “suite for the effete,” the song begins as though a set up to a joke, the punchline of which lies in the previous four songs: “The meek and mild, reckless and wild, the unborn child all walk into the bar. They gather ‘round to hear the sound of some old clown who stands with a guitar.”
The second half of the album, described as a “blood-curdling mix of hope, disdain and disbelief,” comprises songs that the band knocked out during their Wednesday sessions. Side two begins with “Steppin’ to Holy Cow,” a track that is among Spillers’ favorites on the LP. The song was penned about a year ago, regarding the “constant crazy dance of the news cycle.” The idea was born from a joke between the bandmates, about creating a dance move out of checking one’s phone for catastrophic or disheartening news.
“You gotta be careful. Every second you open up your phone, it’s another ‘holy cow’ moment, so we were like, it’s a fun little dance, the ‘steppin’ to the holy cow.’”
“It’s ridiculous in concept,” Spillers said. But so is the fucking world we live in right now too.”
The LP culminates in “The Imploding Mime,” one of the strongest tunes on the album, and Spillers’ first crack at writing a finale song. When performing “The Imploding Mime” live, the band stops playing and sings together in a dramatic a capella, as an infectiously repeated lyric becomes a closing salutation to the listener:
“Now that we’ve blown your minds, you can get in your car and drive away.”