This album tells deep, heavy and guttering perspectives. The tenderness and vulnerability coming from the vocals and the dedicated moments where the tempo drags and slams about the album create space for a long and shifting story to be told. An inherently female and strangled perspective. The opening 2 songs set the tone of reflecting and longing for a life before everything happened, a life when it felt like there were more options and you weren’t beaten down by patriarchy again and again. For the rest of the album this theme of being abused by the system until one feel like they have no other option but to lash out, is explored more. Snippets of women speaking break apart the noise with thought provoking feminist theories, which make the album feel so personal like I’m flicking through my note’s app, between poems and lyrics ideas and parts of politician’s speeches and exerts from a book.
Sonically the music is breathtaking, the subtle violin that spookily jumps in and out paired with the slamming and tom heavy grooves gives a sense of depth and does a phenomenal job of emulating the emotions of the songs. The music has slow beautiful groves and valleys before bursting into these noise filled explosions before coming back together and creating a noisy melodic longform outbursts.
Ive watched a couple of live videos of this band after hearing this album and the stage present the vocalist, Taylor Zantingh, is something that I’ve been yearning to see from a band on a larger stage for years. In an Instagram post they spoke about performing this set live feels painful and a ritualistic catharsis, which I can 100% see and relate to. It feels really good to see such beautiful music that comes from such a dark painful place be created and then shared with an audience in such a way that it becomes performance art, it is the missing piece a lot of punk bands are missing and what makes the music of PISS even more beautiful and powerful.
I have linked the bands website below as well as a live video of theirs that I love.
website:
PISS live on KEXP:
