Is misandry a growing threat to our society? Catcalling women on the street: a socially acceptable form of flattery? Do you have an allergy to certain delicious herbal tea blends? If you said yes to any of these questions, the members of Tacocat are not your friends, but you might end up liking them anyway. Though they've been around since 2007, the Seattle quartet are relatively new to a wider audience. Over the past few months, they've been expanding upon their longtime underground reputation as a gutsy bubblegum surf-rock outfit bolstered by an adorable meme, some goofy Y2K nostalgia, and—above all—an unparalleled feminist wit that's hard to hate, even if you're the target.
It's born of practice: Tacocat's Hardly Art debut, the ironically sunshiny NVM, is hardly their first foray into the satire game. Back in 2012, vocalist Emily Nokes and bassist Bree McKenna were the pair of masterminds behind "Men Who Rock," the now-legendary cover feature of local Seattle weekly The Stranger that brilliantly skewered the music media's objectification of female musicians. Two years later, NVM—an abbreviation for "nevermind" coined by the post-Nirvana AOL generation—has become an extension of that tradition, turning just the right cheerful screws on haters from all corners of their hegemonic hellscape.
Whether it's the male gaze ("Hey Girl") or menstruation ("Crimson Wave"), seasonal affective disorder ("Bridge to Hawaii") or becoming a woman ("Psychedelic Quinceañera"), or even just hometowns that have a collective aneurysm every time it snows ("Snow Day")—no vexation is safe from the sprightly melodies of Tacocat. "In my experience, making jokes about that kind of stupid stuff has made people check themselves more than when people yell at them about it," Nokes said in a recent interview. So instead of a blistering indictment, she and her friends made an album that throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics that might otherwise induce rage blackouts, a light-hearted reminder that sometimes the best way to defeat an enemy is to make them sheepishly laugh.
Like many of their compatriots, Tacocat draw as heavily on 60s surf rock and girl-group radio hits as they do on 90s and 00s MTV alt-rock rotation ("Quinceañera" is bolstered by horns worthy only of Cake), but where peers have settled for simple, fest-ready party rock, Tacocat use those influences to complement a musical comedy that's effortless and immediately justifies its existence: I didn't realize I needed a song about hating my bus line with an all-consuming passion, yet "FU #8" delivers like a Sky Mall patent direct from heaven. Almost every track, save the disappointing-only-by-comparison "Alien Girl" and opener "You Never Came Back", serves a highly specific, completely unromantic purpose, especially in the lives of women: they're simple theme songs, #realtalk jingles to tuck away in the personal artillery that gets you through a particularly dumb day.
And though it seems downright insane when paired with the actual sounds contained on the album, most of NVM, despite its humor, is still sincerely concerned with the bullshit inherent in power structures, as much as a Bikini Kill or a Sleater-Kinney or even a White Lung. It lacks the sonic weight that so easily matches those feminist frustrations, but it would be foolish to want such things of a band like Tacocat, because there are so few places in which to find sentiments like these in such a refreshingly sunny musical context. The only anchor the album really needs is the certainty that one day your world will treat you like utter garbage, and only the sarcastic irreverence of Tacocat can lift you out of your vortex of suckitude. Cheeky but not bratty, NVM leaves a statement behind without preaching or scolding (save perhaps on "This Is Anarchy," a satirical, natural mate to millennial eye-rollers like Bent Shapes' "Brat Poison"). It's simple and approachable, but its wit gives it longevity—at least, until a song about "communists in the summer house" is passé.
