Blood, guts, and pus streak Sadie Dupuis’ songs like a biohazardous Pollock. Her band, Speedy Ortiz, celebrates the tenth anniversary of their debut LP (2011’s The Death of Speedy Ortiz) with The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, a 22-song treatise on the trials and tribulations of the flesh. Dupuis’ songwriting has always been the beating, bleeding heart of Speedy Ortiz. Melodically capricious and lyrically eviscerating—one line refers to a “backseat seppuku, gutting more than the core”—Dupuis entices, threatens, and confesses with a glibness that belies her vulnerability. The grim and witty expressionism she brings to her songwriting has put Dupuis in a class of her own.
In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early releases, The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker, which were both released by Dupuis in 2011. Back then, she had yet to tour with artists like Liz Phair and Foo Fighters; even as Speedy Ortiz blossomed from a solo project into a fledgling band, they had mostly played festivals and smaller venues alongside indie-rock contemporaries. Revisiting the ironic, acerbic charm of the band’s origins with a more mature, developed approach, the reissues clean up the bedroom-pop fuzz of Dupuis’ earlier home recordings while adding the heft and complexity of a full band.
Dupuis has a way of marrying the macabre with the earnest. Seconds after making a relatively cliché boast about being “a different breed,” she poses a stranger, more unguarded question: “Will you eat me when I die?” The specter of death flits through the Speedy Ortiz catalog, and Dupuis uses the body’s impermanence to illustrate her darkest, most unsettling thoughts. On new track and album closer “Son Of,” she describes lying under a bus where “18 wheels slash across me as penance for all my killings.” Even one of the more conventional indie-pop songs, the eponymous “Speedy Ortiz,” lingers on an image of “flies on the ceiling/Mating and molting.”
Previously, Speedy Ortiz sounded more muted, suspending Dupuis’ vocals over the band’s fuzzy instrumentals. And it worked: Her barbs, even when delivered gently, undercut the softness of the songs, drawing you in close to be cut by each and every one. On The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, the sharper production allows the full force of Dupuis’ emotion to burst through. The sinister, vengeful confidence in lines like, “Ate the other children hatching from my mother/Baby, won’t you let me feed” ramps up as the guitar slides into a screech.
Speedy Ortiz’s more acoustic leanings also benefit from the remastering, as vocals become more intelligible and instrumentation more clean-cut. Throughout the twisted lullaby “Ken Ohki,” Dupuis’ voice becomes louder and less distorted, though still relatively tinny, while each strum of the guitar creeps with a twangy unease. It feels far more removed and distant, apt for lines like, “Not like I shaved you/Or drained you and sold all your organs o’erseas;” the sheer depravity of it all is a welcome foil to the soothing rhythm of the song. Each element of “Frankenweenie” feels amplified and somehow sharpened; each of Depuis’ minuscule, dissonant inflections seem to stick out over the eerie, congealed guitar.
The standout of the previously unreleased songs is “Let’s Get Evicted,” a lilting, craven love song where Dupuis murmurs her idea of sweet nothings to a lover who presumably shares her unconventional perspectives: “Let’s kiss off a cliff/Take a nap in a grave/Let’s get evicted and torture our enemies,” she croons sweetly. Suicidal tendencies and human rights violations aside, though, “Let’s Get Evicted” is Dupuis at her most hopeful: her most willing to throw bodily limitations to the wind and forge connections, fleeting as they are.
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