The most liberal use of saxophone you’re likely to hear on a rock record in 2019 does not involve Bruce Springsteen, nor any titans of third-wave ska (yes, Reel Big Fish put out an album recently). It’s the new album by French Vanilla, a cheerfully subversive art-punk group nurtured in Los Angeles’s queer punk scene. Throughout How Am I Not Myself?, Daniel Trautfield’s saxophone squawks, groans, and erupts into melodies far more playful than you might expect from a band that cites Leonard Cohen and novelist Dodie Bellamy among its lyrical influences. These sax parts share virtually no DNA with the smooth sax solo, that much-mocked ’80s tradition recently rehabilitated by the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and the 1975. Like much of French Vanilla’s music, they are jittery and anxious and a little bit outrageous—critiquing cultural norms and reveling in their own absurdity all at once.
French Vanilla are a relatively new band: They released their self-titled first album in 2017, after finding a local audience playing queer punk parties and then DIY performance spaces in L.A. But their music taps into a deeper lineage, one that includes the nervous energy and eccentric vocal stylings of the B-52’s and the jagged no-wave dissonance of early ’80s acts like Bush Tetras. (You could draw a fuzzy line from the latter band’s underground hit, “Too Many Creeps,” and French Vanilla’s own unease with misogynistic institutions.) On “Suddenly,” a devilishly funky mid-album highlight, an octave-leaping sax solo conveys the simultaneous intoxication and anxiety of modern nightlife. “All the Time” evokes the robotic edge of Devo as vocalist Sally Spitz sings about the terror and glee of an intense crush: “The way you look at me, so deep into my eyes/You’re not like other guys,” she blurts, giddy with panic.
Spitz, French Vanilla’s lead vocalist, studied performance art at UCLA, where she was influenced by avant-garde giants like Diamanda Galás and Nina Hagen. She is a compellingly weird and charismatic singer; on this album, she whoops (“Real or Not”), talk-sings (“Move Along, Move Ahead”), shrieks cartoonishly (“Joan of Marc by Marc”), and enunciates words with the odd pursed-lips affect commonly employed by Mark Mothersbaugh. The rhythms are fast and nervy; the guitars eschew conventional chord progressions because guitarist Ali Day never learned them.
Like Priests, the D.C. punk band with whom French Vanilla have played, much of the songwriting addresses the overlap between the personal and political, with a probing eye towards sexist power structures. “Lost Power,” one of the record’s more conventionally catchy numbers, finds Spitz reflecting on a sense of identity loss she felt while in a long-term heterosexual relationship. “Bromosapien” skewers a sexist and condescending coworker as Spitz hopefully wonders, “Will there be a day when guys like you don't exist?” It’s an irreverent take on a maddening situation; despite the band’s academic interests, they are not above shouting “I think I hate you!” four times in a row.
How Am I Not Myself? is a brief and self-contained album. What it lacks in stylistic diversity it makes up with sustained and unrelenting energy, even on the least distinctive songs, like the relatively flat “Protective.” The saxophone, of course, is present most of the time—including on the final track, “Sensitive (Not Too Sensitive),” where it trades phrases with Spitz’s righteous exhortations against the indignities of wage labor. That insistent sax is the raucous, unwavering id of a band that takes its anti-oppressive, anticapitalist spirit—but never itself—seriously.
