When Janet Weiss broke her legs and collarbone in a 2019 car crash, she gained a new appreciation for drumming—not just as an artform, but as a lifeline that could be snipped at any moment. The world was in lockdown by the time her bones healed, so Weiss took refuge in daily jams with Quasi bandmate Sam Coomes. The duo ended up recording the first new Quasi album in a decade. “I can hear in the music how happy I am to be there and to be playing at that level again,” Weiss said in a statement announcing the record. She’s right; the audible joy and relief in her drumming is the most tactile part of Breaking the Balls of History. What the record offers in energy, however, it lacks in efficacy; Quasi’s comeback sounds like a productive songwriting session that never got a round of edits, leaving glaring holes where the creativity and experimental vision of their best work should be.
As ever, Quasi remain true to the art-rock spontaneity and lyrical brashness of mid-’90s Portland, Oregon. There are echoes of fellow local acts past and present: punchy keyboard chords on “Queen of Ears” like the Thermals, a tongue-in-cheek guitar solo on “Nowheresville” like Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, an ascending guitar line on “Inbetweenness” like Menomena. Weiss has never drummed harder on a Quasi record; she crashes through “Riots & Jokes” like it’s the last drum fill of an encore. Coomes plays up the fried dissonance of his Rocksichord at every opportunity, bringing a raw, blues-indebted twang to “Rotten Wrock” and a natural complement to his throat-scratching yell on album highlight “Back in Your Tree.” Compared to 2013’s hiatus-inducing Mole City, the enthusiasm is welcome.
Breaking the Balls of History was born from a desire to live—immediately, vivaciously, free from judgment or pressure—before it’s too late. As Weiss put it, “There’s no investing in the future anymore. The future is now. Do it now if you want to do it.” Quasi introduce that carpe diem sensibility with opener “Long Last Laugh,” a scrappy, heartfelt ode to navigating life that’s peppered with metaphors for defense mechanisms, like a porcupine with nails for quills. But the clever imagery and surrealist refrain of “a last long laugh at the edge of dreams” soon give way to more banal, abstract songs that don’t meet the urgency of their subject matter.
Written during the pandemic, Breaking the Balls of History is heavy with the anxiety and fatigue of racial unrest, political violence, and public mistrust. But when Quasi march onward in peace from those problems while simultaneously shooting backward in annoyance, it’s hard to know which direction they want to go. The lyrics waffle between underwritten observations of hot-button topics and purple prose. In “Doomscrollers,” Coomes sets a scene full of charged imagery: Punisher skulls on pick-up trucks, kids stuck in virtual school, “the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers.” But then nothing else happens—not to them, about them, or by them. “Here they come now/Thoughts and prayers,” he sings later on “Nowheresville,” gesturing to the politician’s rote response to tragedy without any supporting commentary. If this is a laugh at the edge of a dream, it’s an awkward one—the kind that fills a pregnant silence.
Quasi didn’t come out of 2020 empty-handed. They sound rejuvenated and youthful, but they forget to look beyond the moment that prompted their rebirth. That’s shaping up to be a frequent hangup of pandemic art: for better or for worse, much of the middle class experienced lockdown in a similar way, leaving artists to recount what many listeners know firsthand. You can’t help but wish Quasi illustrated their nonsensical dreams with more color, or rubbed their eyes harder to produce a clearer vision of the realities they condemn. Instead, Breaking the Balls of History has a blurry quality: a jumble of all-too-familiar thoughts that never add up to a breakthrough.
