At the core of Pill’s debut full-length, Convenience, is a statement in the form of a question: “Is this situation based on power?” The query is rhetorical—of course it is—and singer/bassist Veronica Torres has her follow-up locked and loaded, a revolver pointed at the head of the patriarchy. “My body, my queerness, my decision to bring life,” she sings on “My Rights.” “My body my fight, congressman wants to steal all of my rights.”
Already fixtures in the Brooklyn DIY scene, Pill introduced themselves last year with a self-titled EP that dropped via Andrew Savage’s Dull Tools label. (The band has since signed to Mexican Summer.) As with Savage’s band, the post-punk quartet Parquet Courts, Pill are careful students of rock history, but difficult to pigeonhole. Often, Pill is described as a no wave act, a genre that was defined above all by its refusal to be categorized. “I can’t stand it when you hear a band and you know exactly what’s in their record collection,” Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch once said. While one might guess at the bands that have inspired Pill (Neu!, ESG, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney), the four-piece is more than an assortment of influences.
Convenience, takes the themes of their EP and expands on them, tightening their hooks in some places, letting looser arrangements unfurl in others. Torres tends towards a speak-sneer that sometimes verges on spoken word. Her lyrics, steeped in feminism, are immediate and cutting. “Convenience is more modern-day folk or protest music for the conflicted confines that New York City has become,” reads Pill’s Bandcamp description. Anger is vented, lust explored and questions asked, but no panacea offered.
On “Fetish Queen,” Torres presents herself as both a sex object and romantic adversary. “Picture me in your favorite tee,” she sings, indulging High Fidelity rock dude fantasies, before flipping the script: “Love serenade in a hand grenade/Love serenade in a bondage game.” Though Torres’ lyrics are confrontational and sardonic, they’re also clever, sometimes darkly funny. “Body con, body conscious, body consent, body control,” she sings on “Love & Other Liquids,” mixing images of Herve Leger clubwear with a pro-choice call to arms. On “Speaking Up,” a song about a workplace sexual advance, the liner notes include a sad face emoji. “No I won’t get you a coffee :-( I’m your superior!,” they read, placing the exchange firmly, and realistically, in the realm of an office Slack chat. Set to clean guitar and warbling sax, plays like the negative of a Violent Femmes song, with Pill calling out creepiness for what it is.
But Pill is more than a mouthpiece for Torres and, more often than not, she’s locked right in with the other three players. Convenience ranges from post-punk to surf-rock to free-jazz, but no matter the sound, the songs seem rooted in communal improvisation. Benjamin Jaffe, the band’s saxophonist, creates ribbons of noise that oscillate between artful squawks, painterly washes of sound, and technical, free-associative runs. The sax establishes a constant push and pull with Torres, and the lyrics about power dynamics are mirrored in the back-and-forth of the song structures, with Jaffe serving as a de-facto second vocalist. Using Andrew Spaulding and Torres’ tight rhythm section as anchor, Jaffe just as easily becomes a lounge act riding a motorik beat (“Love & Other Liquids”) or a psychedelic punk, whose dissonant wails melt into the chug of Jonathan Campolo’s guitars (“Medicine”). Campolo and Spaulding, it should be said, do triple duty or more—each playing a variety of instruments including a custom-made noise rig.
Because *Convenience *covers so much distance, and does so with such a free-associative spirit, everything doesn’t always hang together; it wouldn’t be as interesting if it did. Unexpected digressions lead to minutes of far-out jamming that derail the album’s momentum (see: “Sex With Santa”). The band is more effective when riding a groove (“Vagabond”) rather than going for broke in psychedelic-freakout mode (“100% Cute”). More often than not, though, Pill’s four members create controlled chaos that combines musical chops rarely seen in punk with incisive social commentary. Other bands have one without the other, but Pill know words are only as powerful as the music behind them.
