About halfway through "Shoplifting", the shortest track on the Slits' landmark 1979 album Cut, Ari Up unleashes one of the most spine-tingling screams in punk history. Until that moment the song has a mischievous air: Viv Albertine palm-mutes an off-kilter chord progression, Palmolive's beat lurches in fits and starts, and Up muffles a shit-eating grin as she whispers to her co-conspirators, "Put the cheddar in the pocket, put the rest under the jacket. Talk to the cashier, he won't suspect." It's a song about punking the system in order to eat ("Babylonian won't lose much/And we'll have dinner tonight"), but it's also a revolt against villains more pervasive than the corner store cashier: the false promises of dole-dependent England, the stereotypical norms of femininity, and the stifling conventions of the late-1970s musical establishment. Up, with her defiant scream, leads a gleefully liberating getaway.
Though Up was arguably the most outspoken Slit, guitarist Viv Albertine was responsible for the jouncing upstrokes that characterized the group's sound. Albertine's anarchic collision of reggae rhythms and abrasive noise made her one of the more innovative guitarists of punk's first wave. Still, while their friends in the Clash and the Sex Pistols were embracing the idea of beaming their subversive messages to the masses, the Slits kept it resolutely uncommercial. (Though it almost surely would have been a hit, they refused to release their terrific cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" as their debut single.) Admirable as these DIY instincts are, it's a tiny tragedy of rock history that a song about Viv Albertine (her remote, railway-accessible home + a jilted ex named Mick Jones = "Train in Vain") is much more widely known than any song she ever wrote (she composed, among others, the Slits' sardonic anthem "Typical Girls"). It's a much bigger tragedy, though, that after the Slits disbanded, Albertine claims she didn't touch her Telecaster for 25 years.
But after the Slits' mid-aughts reunion (which was cut short by Up's untimely death a few years later) Albertine started writing again. "It was like an avalanche," she recalled in a 2010 interview, "I became like a teenage boy, who had to be in his room playing every day... It was quite strange for a woman of a certain age to feel like this [but] I realized I hadn't known what was going on in myself until it all came flying out from the guitar." The result of this outpouring of creativity was Albertine's highly personal Flesh EP, released in 2010 on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! label. Softer and more vulnerable than her work in the Slits, Albertine's solo work tackles themes of love, marriage, and disillusionment with equal parts humor and pathos. And though her solo debut (coming 33 years after Cut), The Vermillion Border improves upon the EP in almost every way, it's still shot through with the same sense of urgency. True to her first band's uncommercial instincts, it sounds like the work of somebody who picked her guitar back up simply because she had something she needed to say.
Like "Shoplifting", "Confessions of a MILF", the best song on the album, ping-pongs between repression and release. Documenting an unhappy housewife's inner voice, Albertine whispers the verses' exaggeratedly saccharine melody ("I've peeled the potatoes, there's not much left to do/ Lovely lemon drizzle cake, heat up the fondue") like a Stepford Wife singing an Oompah Loompah parable. But the longer the song goes on, the more its undercurrent of darkness bubbles to the surface. By its finale, a warping, manically chanted refrain of "There's no place like home," the song becomes reminiscent of Sleater-Kinney's "Modern Girl", a quietly dystopian dream to choked to death on its own fairy dust. Unlike "Shoplifting", though, it never provides that moment of catharsis. But its hush only adds to the song's unsettling power. "MILF" is an updated take on an idea the Slits always embodied: Punk isn't necessarily about making the loudest noise, but giving breath to the most radical, surprising, and unspoken truths.
Though it doesn't reach the same heights, Vermillion Border at times recalls Marianne Faithfull's mid-career, middle-age masterpiece Broken English. Not every critique is as much of a direct hit as "MILF"; songs like "The False Heart" and "The Madness of Clouds" ramble on with variations of themes explored more compellingly elsewhere. But thankfully her wit returns on the hilariously biting "Hookup Girl". A fairytale of modern courtship ("I was his forever girl/ Now he's asking me to be his hookup girl"), it first seems like the song's narrator has it better than the miserably repressed self-proclaimed MILF. But instead, the song unfurls a provocative question: Is hookup culture liberating, or just another gilded cage? Albertine's narrator would probably say the latter: As the affair corrodes into boring sex, she finds herself sighing a lyric that could have been lifted from "MILF": "We don't talk, he doesn't want to know my thoughts."
A fiery, irreverent teenager herself when she arrived on the London scene, Albertine knows better than anybody that punk has always been the province of the young (and young men in particular). So even when The Vermillion Border occasionally ambles and falls short, there's still something kinetic and refreshingly subversive about its biting, wizened, and uncompromisingly feminist voice. Nowhere is this felt more viscerally than on the opening track, where over a seething swirl of guitars, Albertine shouts a simple rallying cry, "I want more!" It's an affirmation from, in Albertine's words, a woman of a certain age who sometimes still feels (and shreds) like a teenage boy.
