23 Minutes is a Long Ride

This is our first real taste of Perfect Pussy. The five piece riled the hype machine with their very washed out cassette demo, I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling, but four songs can only say so much about a band. Say Yes To Love is still short—eight tracks—but they punch you right in the face. They’re slightly removed from their past hardcore tendencies this time around, but their sound is tight and confident. This Perfect Pussy you’ve been hearing about is worth your time.

Say Yes To Love started with reason, with Ray McAndrew (guitar), Garrett Koloski (drums) and Greg Ambler (bass) tracking their parts with clarity and precision. Then frontwoman Meredith Graves and producer/key player Shaun Sutkus came in and threw in the noise. It’s hard to tell, but Graves has a background in opera and jazz vocals and she maintains a demanding presence on an album that intentionally mixes her vocals toward obscurity. Feedback operates like an attack-and-release drone, shouting through rare moments of empty space between her vocal phrases. For this reason, it takes some careful listening to realize to listen carefully.

When decipherable, this album is charmed by depraved nihilism, i.e., “I want to fuck myself and I want to eat myself” and boisterousness, re: “If I’m anything less than perfection / Well shit, nobody told me!” Graves is a feminist punk prototype and she’s clever. Look at the album title– it seems to allure hopeless romantics until the context arrives, “When did we all decide to give up? / Since when do we say yes to love?” Graves may not be the person you want singing at your wedding, and in fact, “Interference Fits” might be the only track that the faint of heart could even think to stomach. That, and maybe the ambient noise on “VII,” which ends an otherwise direct album with the band seemingly searching, or maybe just meandering.

All in all, Perfect Pussy holds up and for all it’s tenacity, Say Yes to Love is more optimistic than you might guess. The band implements untraditional structures and signatures and the tracks flow together in a way that affirms all that hype. Graves is a force that will be reckoned with. I mean, a limited edition vinyl print of Say Yes actually contains her menstruations swirled into the plastic, how goddamn punk is that?