Split Second is Up Past Lights

Whitney Gulden

Meet Split Second. A three-guy musical group who has self produced their own album on DatPiff.com called Up Past Lights. Although I don’t know much about them, as they are a freelance and self-made group, they seem like sweet guys with major talent at producing music. On the album they go by the names Xcel, Jaxx, and Dougie P.

Up Past Lights has 20 songs, every single one was created from scratch by these guys.  Lyrics, sound, beat, mixing, everything. It blows my mind.  If you remember back to around October, the Outback Teen Center threw that insane Chris Webby concert for NCHS students. Check out the song Division One Swag. Webby is on there in force.

As I write this, I’m listening to the album on my iPhone and it continues to amaze me. What high schoolers have skills like this? They go from acapella to rapping out lyrics to guitar, to mixing. If you aren’t listening while you read, fix that.

The Intro (Up Past Lights) is my second favorite, so start there, young grasshopper. Ease the Pain, and Miss Anonymous are next up on favorites. Sundress is the all time favorite by Split Second, but it isn’t on the album, so check the link.

Another song that makes me do a double take is Bonafide Hustler, mostly because it has M.I.A.’s Paper Planes chorus mixed in. The amount of pop culture references in the songs is pretty cool, they mention That’s So Raven, J Crew, and Transformers in just one verse.

The first time I listened to this album, I thought it would be like the music tech sounds you hear before the video announcements on Fridays. Yeah, I was wrong. This is brilliance. I 98% guarantee you that you will find one or more songs you like if you listen to the entire album. As for the 1%, that’s for the people who I can’t explain Split Second’s epicness too…well, you sit inside listening to classical music all day, don’t you?

Hitting up every subject from boarding school life, to parent issues, to dream girls, to high energy songs, Split Second is the uncensored story of Split Second’s life, the life of high schoolers.  Literally its uncensored, and I have no idea how they produced songs with swears in them at boarding prep school when warm-up CDs for NCHS sports teams have to be squeaky clean…they certainly are proud of being prep school (listen to I Love Prep Boyz).

Anyways, as I was saying, Split Second is on youtube, myspace and datpiff. Solid, solid, solid stuff. I don’t think I could ever appreciate the mixing on this album enough.