For a young band just starting out, few things are really within its control. It picks up recording time when it can, or records the songs itself. It contacts tons of venues and hopes one responds, sometimes before the band has any proof of competency. In short, the early work of a band is simply what it can get. So to be catapulted into the internet hyposphere on the back of a demo must be a strange and dizzying prospect for the band involved. And so it goes for Perfect Pussy.
I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling strikes me as the messy first grumblings of something exciting but still nascent, melody and songwriting melted together on a boombox tape left too long in the sun. DIY by necessity. Meredith Graves’s oblong shouts are completely unintelligible, buried under mountains of buzz and tape feedback and cymbal distortion. This set makes it sound like these songs would be heard much more clearly just about anywhere else: on a shitty basement PA, heard through the wall of an adjacent room, shouted through Syracuse traffic; anywhere but this recording.
Which makes judging the thing so hard, because it feels like a blueprint, less the self-imposed lo-fi of Darkthrone than the outward meddling of early Venom records (incidentally, this sounds like neither, but I can’t avoid a fun comparison). But what can I hear? What can I make of it? Well, there is the injection of furious speed and melodicism that defined mid-period Hüsker Dü, paired to the personal confessions and military bark of early hardcore, with some of the more abstract and experimental elements that would pop up in early years. And oh yeah: it’s really fun, a total blast to listen to, even if you’re not sure what you’re listening to.
And with this little messy blast the band is going places, touring around the country and opening for modern hardcore greats like Ceremony. And all off the back of a demo, the sort of thing most bands hope to bury once a proper record, recorded with more freedom than the imposed noise of a no-fi tape allows, arrives. Best of luck to them.
