Syracuse five-piece Perfect Pussy sound like a hardcore band fronted by Joan of Arc: A swirling maelstrom of fire engulfs a singer who shouts with the ecstatic conviction of someone who would rather die than apologize. Following a searing, four-song demo tape released last year, their proper full-length debut Say Yes to Love is an unrelentingly intense experience—23 minutes of five people pushing themselves to their absolute limit. Frontwoman Meredith Graves has called the band's songs "happy revelations about incendiary events," and this remains the most fitting description of their music. It doesn’t feel corny or hyperbolic to call this record life-affirming, so perfectly does it capture the flashes of gratitude, self-knowledge, and inexplicable joy that often follow an experience of great pain.
A Perfect Pussy song comes together in layers, and the group’s writing process is a kind of sonic avalanche. Graves has said that her bandmates Ray McAndrew (guitar), Garrett Koloski (drums), and Greg Ambler (bass) usually record a totally clean track first, and then she and keyboardist Shaun Sutkus come in and "make noise on purpose." That approach gives these songs an energy that is both chaotic and collaborative—the instruments sound like they're wrestling each other for space instead of working in harmony. And the textures of the eight songs on Say Yes to Love are damaged but also luminous; even at its most assaultive moments, like the gale-force ripper "Advance Upon the Real", jangly chords and a bright melody shine defiantly somewhere below the surface.
Say Yes to Love is so relentlessly pummeling that it's almost meditative, and its songs are caked in so much sludge it's often hard to make out what Graves is saying. Until, very suddenly, it's not. You know the feeling when you're in a place that's so loud and crowded that you have to scream into the ear of the person next to you, and then suddenly the room goes quiet and now everyone can hear you? And how this always seems to happen when you're saying the most private and potentially embarrassing thing? In a Perfect Pussy song, this happens to Graves constantly—"AND I WANT TO FUCK MYSELF/ AND I WANT TO EAT MYSELF," she is caught saying in one of these moments of jolting clarity. But a great power emerges as she delivers even her most vulnerable lines without a twinge of shame. She sounds emboldened by silence, her presence growing to fill it, like a person whose voice has been stifled and is now overjoyed by the chance to be heard.
It's easy to be overtaken by the primal force of this music but there's also an incentive to dig deeper. Say Yes to Love is a convincing argument for reviving that practice of reading along with the lyrics while listening. Graves' lines are full of vivid, visceral, and often unsettling images ("You can read the story of my last six weeks/ In little black bruises and marks from boys' teeth") and the sort of bold confessions plenty of people wouldn't tell their best friends. And her delivery is at once shit-kickingly tough and childlike, sometimes reminiscent of Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins' wide-eyed swagger.
Perfect Pussy have been criticized for the buried vocals and often unintelligible lyrics, but the approach serves a purpose. There's tension in this music between vulnerability and defenses, between the things we tell each other and the things we feel the need to keep hidden. The lyrics to songs like "Interference Fits" and "Dig" (which meditates on sex and violence) are so intense that hearing every word could almost be a distraction—it'd be hard to pay attention to anything else. So you're given a choice of how to experience these songs: You can lose yourself in the rush, or you can follow along and think more closely about what they're trying to say.
There are a few moments in "Big Stars" when the feedback squall sounds like it's bleeping out something Graves is saying. If it's intentional, it's a pretty good joke about arbitrary censorship—a topic Perfect Pussy know well as they've quickly gone from being evangelized in limited-run underground zines to being covered in publications too refined to print their name. But an irony that we're just starting to understand as a culture is that, for women in particular, the first word in Perfect Pussy's name is much more obscene than the second. If you're female, it's far more socially acceptable to express self-deprecation than self-love, and it's more acceptable for anybody to express numbly detached nihilism than Perfect Pussy's particular brand of hard-won, audaciously blazing joy. Something about Say Yes to Love—the way Graves' bright, confidently optimistic vocals are threatened to be drowned out at every turn—speaks to the forces that make women in our society feel like they must exist in a constant state of perceived inadequacy. And fuck all that, says Graves at the end of the careening "Dig": "If I'm anything less than perfection/ Well shit, nobody told me!" Say Yes to Love is one of the hardest and most jarring records I've heard in a long time, not because it's trying to shock you with darkness, but because it's unafraid to stare directly into the light.
