TUESDAY NOV 19, 2019
Chastity Belt
A few years ago, while in a tour van somewhere in Idaho, the members of Chastity Belt—Julia Shapiro, Gretchen Grimm, Lydia Lund, and Annie Truscott—opted to pass the time in a relatively unusual fashion: They collectively paid one another compliments, in great and thoughtful detail. This is what we like best about you, this is why we love you.
I think of that image all the time, the four of them opening themselves up like that, by choice. It’s hard to imagine other bands doing the same. But beyond their troublesome social media presence—see: the abundance of weapons-grade duck face, the rolling suitcase art—and beyond the moonlit deadpan of say, “IDC,” lies, at the very least, an honesty and an intimacy and an emotional brilliance that galvanizes everything they do together. Which is a fancy way of saying: They’re funny, but they’re also capable of being vulnerable. “Giant Vagina” and “Pussy Weed Beer,” two highlights from their aptly titled 2013 debut, No Regerts, were immediately preceded by a sublime yet easily overlooked cut named “Happiness.” I saw a younger, still unsettling version of myself all across 2015’s Time to Go Home.
This June marks the release of I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, their third and finest full-length to date. Recorded live in July of 2016, with producer Matthew Simms (Wire) at Jackpot! in Portland, Oregon (birthplace of some of their favorite Elliott Smith records), it’s a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of moody post-punk that finds the Seattle outfit’s feelings in full view, unobscured by humor. There is no irony in its title: Before she had Chastity Belt, and the close relationships that she does now, Shapiro considered herself a career loner. That’s no small gesture. I can make as much sense of this music as I can my 20s: This is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish (“This Time of Night”) to shimmering insight (“Different Now”) to gauzy ambiguity (“Stuck,” written and sung by Grimm). It’s a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Shapiro shares early on its staggering title track: “I wanna be sincere.”
When asked, their only request was that what you’re reading right now be brief, honest, free of hyperbole, and “v chill.” When pressed for more, Truscott said, “Just say that we love each other. Because we do.”
This is who they are, this is why I love them.
—David Bevan, February 2017
“They’re funny, and slightly goofy, and gently vulgar, and they play with an appealingly loose, relaxed confidence.” – Pitchfork
“In between pelvic-thrusting sexual innuendo and self-mockery, Chastity Belt filter feminist theory, cultural commentary and general intellectual bad-assery…Chastity Belt isn’t the band 2013 wants—it’s the band 2013 needs.” – CMJ
“The guitars on this record…have a nice ring to them, like Liz Phair’s recordings.” – NPR
A few years ago, while in a tour van somewhere in Idaho, the members of Chastity Belt—Julia Shapiro, Gretchen Grimm, Lydia Lund, and Annie Truscott—opted to pass the time in a relatively unusual fashion: They collectively paid one another compliments, in great and thoughtful detail. This is what we like best about you, this is why we love you.
I think of that image all the time, the four of them opening themselves up like that, by choice. It’s hard to imagine other bands doing the same. But beyond their troublesome social media presence—see: the abundance of weapons-grade duck face, the rolling suitcase art—and beyond the moonlit deadpan of say, “IDC,” lies, at the very least, an honesty and an intimacy and an emotional brilliance that galvanizes everything they do together. Which is a fancy way of saying: They’re funny, but they’re also capable of being vulnerable. “Giant Vagina” and “Pussy Weed Beer,” two highlights from their aptly titled 2013 debut, No Regerts, were immediately preceded by a sublime yet easily overlooked cut named “Happiness.” I saw a younger, still unsettling version of myself all across 2015’s Time to Go Home.
This June marks the release of I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, their third and finest full-length to date. Recorded live in July of 2016, with producer Matthew Simms (Wire) at Jackpot! in Portland, Oregon (birthplace of some of their favorite Elliott Smith records), it’s a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of moody post-punk that finds the Seattle outfit’s feelings in full view, unobscured by humor. There is no irony in its title: Before she had Chastity Belt, and the close relationships that she does now, Shapiro considered herself a career loner. That’s no small gesture. I can make as much sense of this music as I can my 20s: This is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish (“This Time of Night”) to shimmering insight (“Different Now”) to gauzy ambiguity (“Stuck,” written and sung by Grimm). It’s a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Shapiro shares early on its staggering title track: “I wanna be sincere.”
When asked, their only request was that what you’re reading right now be brief, honest, free of hyperbole, and “v chill.” When pressed for more, Truscott said, “Just say that we love each other. Because we do.”
This is who they are, this is why I love them.
—David Bevan, February 2017
“They’re funny, and slightly goofy, and gently vulgar, and they play with an appealingly loose, relaxed confidence.” – Pitchfork
“In between pelvic-thrusting sexual innuendo and self-mockery, Chastity Belt filter feminist theory, cultural commentary and general intellectual bad-assery…Chastity Belt isn’t the band 2013 wants—it’s the band 2013 needs.” – CMJ
“The guitars on this record…have a nice ring to them, like Liz Phair’s recordings.” – NPR
Strange Ranger
In one of the few recorded interviews with the elusive Burial, the producer admitted to spending much of his time walking city streets alone, sometimes in pursuit of an obvious objective, other times because he had nothing else to do. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people,” he said. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”
It’s a disarmingly earnest sentiment, one that has stuck with Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger since he first read it years ago, when the band was just getting started playing house show circuits in and around the mountain West. We are taught to believe that life is made up of a series of arrivals, but it is in the liminal spaces where we most often experience the sublime. Strange Ranger’s transcendent fourth album, Pure Music, was made to be heard in private moments between where you’ve been and where you’re going. Though that Burial quote resonates, these songs have a pulse so strong they’re practically breathing; not touching your heart, but gripping it.
Recorded at a cabin in upstate New York as a blizzard raged outside, Pure Music elucidates the promise of No Light in Heaven, a mixtape that hinted the band was cocooned in a state of near total transformation. Pure Music emerged from the same sessions, and while No Light in Heaven resembles, in places, bygone iterations of Strange Ranger’s sound, Pure Music is easily their most exciting and ambitious work to date because it was made with so little concern for what anyone might expect of them, as if they were a band without history. It's an album that feels out of this time, one that lives in a dimension running parallel to ours.
Strange Ranger now occupy a space best described as uncanny; on Pure Music, the band indulges an obsession with Loveless, but they infiltrate any comparison to shoegaze with overtures to disco, house, and experimental pop. The Talk Talk inspired pean to isolation “Way Out” features a saxophone part played by Nathan Tucker, while “She’s On Fire” is only a rock song until just after the midway point, when the drums throb, the snare skitters then snaps, and suddenly, you’re in a sweaty pit of swaying bodies dancing as Eiger and Fiona Woodman harmonize, “I would have thought the rhythm of the club might lead me somewhere.” “Music makes us transcend the feeling of being alienated from or trapped by the world,” Woodman says. “I want the experience of listening to Pure Music to be euphoric.”
It’s been four years since Strange Ranger released the spirited Remembering the Rockets, and in the interim period, the band surveyed a range of electronic production techniques, determined to integrate them on Pure Music. That effort is apparent from the outset; opening track “Rain So Hard” is scaffolded upon layers of oceanic synths, the trill of a marimba, and a mournful guitar part that mirrors the lyrical content. Written while Eiger and Woodman – who had been dating for five years – were in the process of breaking up, “Rain So Hard” captures the romantic loneliness of a late subway ride home. “Any day there will be no more stars,” Eiger sings and Woodman echoes, “How do I get out of this movie now?”
“I was a little freaked out when I heard the news,” Tucker admits. “But the way they went about everything made it obvious they still care about each other and about making music together.” Despite the breakup, Fred Nixon says Pure Music felt like Strange Ranger’s most collaborative effort to date. “With a few exceptions, I can’t tell whose production ideas were whose, when I listen back to it,” he says. “We were literally trapped in this cabin, manically working at all hours, and the energy was crazy, in a fun way.”
Pure Music embodies that manic state through interstitial interludes laced with YouTube samples that connect each track to the next so as to submerge the listener in its world, one that rewards catharsis.“Wide Awake” captures it best when, over a glistening guitar part, Woodman sings the rapturous chorus with an ease that defies the disquiet in Eiger’s voice: “And with the window open, you call me outside.” The alienated might gaze through panes of glass eternally, without breaching the gap between the self and the destabilizing chaos of the world beyond. Riding the train across the East River in the early morning, one witnesses thousands of individual stories, each contained within a glowing square of light, and it's a comfort to know that soon, those strangers will emerge from their solitude to rejoin the city.
In one of the few recorded interviews with the elusive Burial, the producer admitted to spending much of his time walking city streets alone, sometimes in pursuit of an obvious objective, other times because he had nothing else to do. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people,” he said. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”
It’s a disarmingly earnest sentiment, one that has stuck with Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger since he first read it years ago, when the band was just getting started playing house show circuits in and around the mountain West. We are taught to believe that life is made up of a series of arrivals, but it is in the liminal spaces where we most often experience the sublime. Strange Ranger’s transcendent fourth album, Pure Music, was made to be heard in private moments between where you’ve been and where you’re going. Though that Burial quote resonates, these songs have a pulse so strong they’re practically breathing; not touching your heart, but gripping it.
Recorded at a cabin in upstate New York as a blizzard raged outside, Pure Music elucidates the promise of No Light in Heaven, a mixtape that hinted the band was cocooned in a state of near total transformation. Pure Music emerged from the same sessions, and while No Light in Heaven resembles, in places, bygone iterations of Strange Ranger’s sound, Pure Music is easily their most exciting and ambitious work to date because it was made with so little concern for what anyone might expect of them, as if they were a band without history. It's an album that feels out of this time, one that lives in a dimension running parallel to ours.
Strange Ranger now occupy a space best described as uncanny; on Pure Music, the band indulges an obsession with Loveless, but they infiltrate any comparison to shoegaze with overtures to disco, house, and experimental pop. The Talk Talk inspired pean to isolation “Way Out” features a saxophone part played by Nathan Tucker, while “She’s On Fire” is only a rock song until just after the midway point, when the drums throb, the snare skitters then snaps, and suddenly, you’re in a sweaty pit of swaying bodies dancing as Eiger and Fiona Woodman harmonize, “I would have thought the rhythm of the club might lead me somewhere.” “Music makes us transcend the feeling of being alienated from or trapped by the world,” Woodman says. “I want the experience of listening to Pure Music to be euphoric.”
It’s been four years since Strange Ranger released the spirited Remembering the Rockets, and in the interim period, the band surveyed a range of electronic production techniques, determined to integrate them on Pure Music. That effort is apparent from the outset; opening track “Rain So Hard” is scaffolded upon layers of oceanic synths, the trill of a marimba, and a mournful guitar part that mirrors the lyrical content. Written while Eiger and Woodman – who had been dating for five years – were in the process of breaking up, “Rain So Hard” captures the romantic loneliness of a late subway ride home. “Any day there will be no more stars,” Eiger sings and Woodman echoes, “How do I get out of this movie now?”
“I was a little freaked out when I heard the news,” Tucker admits. “But the way they went about everything made it obvious they still care about each other and about making music together.” Despite the breakup, Fred Nixon says Pure Music felt like Strange Ranger’s most collaborative effort to date. “With a few exceptions, I can’t tell whose production ideas were whose, when I listen back to it,” he says. “We were literally trapped in this cabin, manically working at all hours, and the energy was crazy, in a fun way.”
Pure Music embodies that manic state through interstitial interludes laced with YouTube samples that connect each track to the next so as to submerge the listener in its world, one that rewards catharsis.“Wide Awake” captures it best when, over a glistening guitar part, Woodman sings the rapturous chorus with an ease that defies the disquiet in Eiger’s voice: “And with the window open, you call me outside.” The alienated might gaze through panes of glass eternally, without breaching the gap between the self and the destabilizing chaos of the world beyond. Riding the train across the East River in the early morning, one witnesses thousands of individual stories, each contained within a glowing square of light, and it's a comfort to know that soon, those strangers will emerge from their solitude to rejoin the city.