God bless middle school bullies: Without the torment they’ve reliably inflicted on generation after generation of brooding, musically-inclined creative types, would there even be indie rock? At the very least there wouldn’t be “No Below,” one of the most striking songs on Northampton, Massachusetts, noise-pop quartet Speedy Ortiz’s proper debut, Major Arcana. “I didn’t know you when I broke my knee,” frontwoman Sadie Dupuis murmurs during the song’s wounded, palm-muted intro, “Spent the summer on crutches, and everybody teased.” Gnarled yet stingingly heartfelt, “No Below” blooms into a portrait of the artist as a friendless tween: death-obsessed, ditched by the one person at school who gets her, and left “freezing alone with [her] thoughts.” You know, the kind of early-onset trauma from which great, off-kilter bedroom-pop eventually springs.
The first album to bear Speedy Ortiz’s name (which itself is a nod to a doomed character in the beloved alt-comic Love and Rockets) was a solo affair. Dupuis’ self-recorded 2011 release, The Death of Speedy Ortiz, was a patchy, sardonic (sample titles: “Hexxy Sadie”, “Kinda Blew”) lo-fi gem in the tradition of early Sebadoh or Liz Phair’s legendary Girlysound tapes. But like the heroine of “No Below” (who later finds a companion to compare scars with: “Everything fucked up we both felt before/I’m glad for it all if it got us where we are”), Dupuis eventually found strength in numbers. By the time Speedy Ortiz’s promising Sports EP came out last year, she’d brought in some new recruits—bassist Darl Ferm, guitarist Matt Robidoux, and drummer Mike Falcone—to kick the firepower up a notch. It worked wonders: A Speedy Ortiz song used to sound like a personally gummed, exactingly aimed spitball, but the best ones on the explosive, earthquaking Major Arcana land like grenades.
Still, even as their songs have grown louder, gnarlier, and more compositionally ambitious, Speedy Ortiz have managed to preserve the intimacy and idiosyncrasy that made Dupuis’ early home recordings so compelling. Which is a testament not just to producer Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr., Chelsea Light Moving) but also to how receptively and thoughtfully all four members play off each other: Ferm and Falcone keep Major Arcana’s rhythms feeling fluid and adventurous but never sloppy, while the ongoing conversation between Dupuis’ vocals and Robidoux’s trebly, agile riffs is particularly essential to Speedy’s charm. As it does on “No Below”’s caustic, catchy chorus (“And though I once said/I was better off just being dead”), Robidoux’s guitar usually mirrors or embroiders Dupuis’ vocal melody, underscoring her words rather than drowning them out.
And thank goodness—because Major Arcana finds Speedy Ortiz joining a depressingly small club of young indie rock bands (maybe the first new members since Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold) writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over. “My mouth is a factory for every toxic part of speech I spew,” Dupuis quivers on the Mascis-indebted sludgefest “Tiger Tank,” and the rest of the record makes good on that promise. Like her hero Stephen Malkmus (she was once the frontwoman of an all-female Pavement cover band called—wait for it—Babement) Dupuis sings like someone palpably fascinated with the way words sound. Check, for one example, the way she scales the line, “criminally twisted puny little villain” in the opening moments of “Fun,” delighting in the texture of every vowel. Her lines strike a tricky balance between feeling loose and meticulously crafted—another trick she must have learned from memorizing Malkmus quotables. On highlights like “Pioneer Spine” or the hellraising “Cash Cab,” Dupuis has a knack for turning seemingly dribbled-out mouthfuls into catchy hooks; in a lot of cases you won’t stop to marvel at the ingenuity of her lines until you’re already singing along.
Speedy Ortiz wear their love of the 1990s on their torn, flannel sleeves, which makes this particular round of Spot the Influence about as challenging as a game of tee-ball: there’s the squalling, guitar-on-guitar carnage of Archers of Loaf, the grungy mysticism of Helium (Dupuis lifted the title Major Arcana from a book she was reading on black magic), and of course the deadpan wit of vintage Phair (“I was never the witch that you made me to be,” Dupuis tells a burnt-out old flame on “Plough,” “Still you picked a virgin over me”). But don’t let any of that lead you to think that Speedy Ortiz are your garden variety nostalgists. Even at its most distortion-caked, there’s a melodic confidence and a gimlet-eyed clarity about Major Arcana that’s a rare find in a debut. They’ve got reverence for their forebears, sure, but unlike a lot of recent bands exhuming the ghosts of indie rock past, Speedy Ortiz also have faith in the peculiar personality traits that set them apart from their heroes. With its quaking rhythms, twisted riffage, and jet-black wit, Major Arcana is a redemptive ode to the broken bones that grew back together a little crooked—the ones that taught Dupuis how to walk in her own weird way.
