"Well, it's not what you think," Sadie Dupuis sings a few seconds into "American Horror", kicking off Speedy Ortiz's new four-song EP, Real Hair. A lot of Speedy Ortiz songs seem to start this way, somewhere between a snicker and a shrug, like Dupuis just showed up late for class in snowboots and a swimcap. Throughout Real Hair, Dupuis keeps finding herself in some awfully precarious positions: sleepless on "American Horror", falling "for a bonebag" on "Oxygal", falling—or is it not falling—for a "bad news" waiter on "Shine Theory." But, whatever comes their way, on Real Hair, the increasingly confident Speedy Ortiz seem more than capable of figuring something out.
From the start, Speedy Ortiz have fared best in the margins. Their rangy, slack-happy music is prone to wandering, but they never drift so far as to leave the hook behind. Bassist Darl Ferm and drummer Mike Falcone have tightened up tighter, while Dupuis and Matt Robidoux's dualing guitars are still perched on the precipice of stringent and slipshod. And these songs are just lousy with melody; there's distortion everywhere, but the occasional dissonance of Major Arcana's given way to a heady, fuzzed-out whoosh. As a lyricist, Dupuis is every bit as fond of the inscrutable left turn as the defense-stripping full-reveal, and the distance between the two is often a couple syllables at best. And she's a chatty, candid, elastic vocalist, taking each syllable as it comes. Dupuis, Master's candidate and Malkmus stan, is a student of words: not just what they mean, but how those meanings intersect. You can skim through Real Hair, taking pleasure in its intricate guitar fuzzbombing and the curious pleasures of Dupuis' language: peep "someone who sleeps with her neck in reverse," or try and guess at how she plans to "coax the pretty waiter from his restaurant." Dig in deeper, though, and Dupuis' tangled lines slowly start to unravel.
Real Hair keeps its runtimes tight and its choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing its fall-apart charms. Everything Speedy Ortiz do well—willful sloppiness, keep-'em-guessing lyricism, and Dupuis' sharp, knowing singing—seems turned up a couple notches on opener "American Horror". As Dupuis and Matt Robidoux pile one spiny guitar atop another, "Horror" slides from a conversational verse into a stompbox-detonating chorus. "Trust me just to my own feet," Dupuis pleads mid-explosion, "and keep me here for a whole week." You can get yourself stuck puzzling out the glue and web full of bees Dupuis sings of on "Horror", but once they punch into that chorus of "baby, you look so crazy," ambiguity's pretty much out the window. Sure enough, "Oxygal" turns up the inscrutability a few clicks. "Oxygal" is Real Hair at its most Frankensteinian, a stop-and-chop verse and woozily desperate chorus that don't seem to belong in the same tune. When it works, there's a gawky, black Chucks-and-tux elegance to Speedy Ortiz' carefully calamitous songcraft, but the jittery "Oxygal" stumbles around a bit too much to ever quite find its footing.
Over shaggy "Cut Your Hair" guitars, "Everything's Bigger" finds Dupuis connecting the dots between a lion, several sets of twins, the slipperiness of regional dialects, and a quick sojourn to the Green Mountain state. It's an odd one, for sure; these red herrings and unplanned asides give Dupuis' songs a certain spontaneity, like she's working them out in real time and keeps throwing in extra embellishments to mess with you. But Dupuis isn't just jamming a bunch of words together to fill stanzas; she's clearly trying to elucidate her points while offering something a little more interesting than a point-by-point. And, for all its misdirection, "Bigger" eventually just comes right out with it: "it's hard to keep a dialect when you keep changing where you come from," Dupuis sings, a hint of bile creeping in.
Musically, Speedy Ortiz still worship at the altar of early 90s indie: Pavement, Helium, Archers of Loaf, their holy trinity. But Dupuis has emerged as a distinctive voice: funny, sharp, ever-so-slightly neurotic, with a tendency to trail off. You've gotta take personality where you can get it in indie rock these days, but by reasserting her own peculiarities—and casting aspersions at those who'd change theirs to suit a scenario—Dupuis just makes herself seem more, well, herself, going through some shit, but certainly never cowering to it.Dupuis has called Major Arcana "kind of a breakup jam," framing Real Hair's deep-digging as being more about getting her own shit together. Spindly closer "Shine Theory" presents Dupuis with what, on paper, appears to be a perfectly acceptable suitor. Still, she passes; "I wanna want him so bad," she tells herself, "but I don't recognize the charms that he has." Though self-examination quickly turns to self-deprecation—as Dupuis puts her own charms under scrutiny—"Shine Theory" is hardly self-pitying; when it's over, you picture Dupuis shrugging, throwing her books in her bag, and leaving the "pretty waiter" to his other tables.
It's tempting to paint Speedy Ortiz as more than they are: not just a very good band on their own terms, but an antidote to the mushmouthed, low-personality murmur blanketing much of circa-2014 indie rock. Though they seem a tad too casual for savior-types, it's hard to miss the things they're doing right. Real Hair takes the gloriously sloppy, haphazardly intricate Speedy Ortiz of Major Arcana and turns it bite-size, sharpening the focus without sanding off the edges. These songs are easy to like, but they're even better when you lean in close. And Dupuis—as a singer and lyricist alike—is only getting more precise and more peculiar. She isn't especially "confessional," but she certainly puts it all out there; these songs unwind like a long, aimless phone call with an old friend, rife with in-jokes, strange segueways, and the occasional moment of clarity. And, simply from a bookkeeping standpoint, dropping an EP in the winter dead zone, some nine months after your debut LP, is about as smart a way as any to keep your name on people's lips. When that EP's as good as Real Hair? All the better.
