RECOMMENDED

Swollen is the debut record from Stickers, a gender-balanced four piece from Seattle, and I’m pretty convinced it’s a great one. The music lives a little more in the darker no wavey side of the contemporary post-punk spectrum; a throbbing din with overdriven amplified bass and guitar and a bleating saxophone, and a sonorously guttural female—but not feminine—voice powering its way through a thick, chugging ballast. The music at first blush is dense and volcanic, at times reminiscent of X-Ray Spex with a growling low end, and other times of Lydia Lunch or Au Pairs; and the compositions reveal subtlety with each listen. The arrangements distinguish themselves from the rest of the contemporary independent rock ghetto through extended driving, repetitious, chugging grooves, holding suspense and tension, and offering the rare quiet spot as “negative space.” And then there’s the lyrics: fantastical, gritty, hyper-sexualized motifs that might conjure a loopy feministic vision though imagined conquests of Ryan Gosling and Jon Bon Jovi (“(swoon)” and “BJ”), or a delusional victimization complexes of rape and submission on at least a couple of others (“Jump Rope,” “Sacajawea,” and “Swollen Future”). In fact all of the songs on Swollen have sex on the brain, but I’m not fully sure to what end, or what to make of what’s being sung, or what I’m expected to think, and I appreciate that the band don’t really seem to force subject matter as its raison d'être, just as a nonchalant matter of fact, buried in the mix or slurred during elocution, nbd. Maybe it’s all satire, who knows? If the band weren’t so nice as to include the lyrics as an insert or I may never have even noticed, and if the music and delivery weren’t as effective and powerful as it is I definitely wouldn’t have even bothered to tell you about it. Killer record. (http://endoftimerecords.bandcamp.com)
(Timothy Cook)