The third album by Tacocat starts with a clean garage-rock tribute to discerning "X-Files" lead "Dana Katherine Scully." It's typical for the Seattle four-piece, who mix songs about their love of pop culture—they just did the theme to the "Powerpuff Girls" reboot—with tirades about periods, pervs, and the patriarchy. Released in 2014, Tacocat's NVM riffed on IM slang for "never mind," a reference to the city's most famous sons, and essentially mocked how far we'd veered from Kurt Cobain's future-female ideals. Its vibrant spirit ran on the kind of energy you'd only otherwise get from chugging a giant sports drink before egging someone's house.
Lost Time (another "X-Files" reference) delves into some of the same subject matter. "FDP" is an SOS from the first day of lead singer Emily Nokes' period, "Plan A, Plan B" mocks the wrongheaded GOP idea that women use the morning-after pill as contraceptive, and "Talk" sounds a little like fellow Pacific Northwester Laura Veirs reincarnated as a frustrated millennial, wishing she and her friends would ditch their iPhones for living room dance parties. "Men Explain Things to Me" takes its name from the Rebecca Solnit essay that popularized the term "mansplaining." "Though I know all about the words you're spitting out, the floor is yours without a doubt," Nokes sings, her typically sharp tongue cutting some blowhard down to size.
They also widen the net, in terms of inspiration. "I Love Seattle" references "The Really Big One," a New Yorker article about the earthquake that will destroy much of the coastal Northwest. There's nowhere else they'd rather be, but admit, "at least no-one's pretending like that would even be bad." The highlight of Lost Time is "I Hate the Weekend," which explains their ambivalence about Seattle falling into the Pacific. In a melody Jenny Lewis wouldn't be ashamed to stick on her recent records, Nokes paints an incisive portrait of how tech bros haven't just whitewashed the city's thriving culture ("paint the rainbow shades of beige"), but terrorize the streets when they "cut loose" at weekends. "Got a hall pass from your job just to act like a fucking slob," they sing, filled with catchy disdain.
And that kind of fire is what Lost Time sorely needs more of. There's no question that many of Lost Time's lyrics are funny, but the attitude that fueled NVM feels crushed. In both the vocal delivery and the driving guitars, the vibe is damper, the color somewhat drained. Sometimes the fruit hangs a little low: "The Internet" is a straight-strummer about trolls. With that in mind, it's unsurprising that the peppier songs here are the ones about the things you do for pleasure and pleasure alone. Lost Time's most inventive song, "Horse Grrls," is a fully enthused stop-start shredder about equestrian obsessives: "They know the different breeds of all their favorite steeds!" And "Night Swimming," too, is lovely—a splashy, beatific jam about breaking into a lake at night, where the only rule is, "You can bring a boombox, but you can't play R.E.M." The final song, "Leisure Bees," is ambitious and engaging, shifting between Beach Boys-indebted harmonies, girl-group coos, and shaggy nostalgic jams.
It makes sense that the record starts with an ode to Scully, whose artful eye-rolls have become the internet's go-to meme in the face of the men who plague your @-replies. Tacocat have always approached feminism from a point of fun rather than anger, but inevitably, when bros keep bro-ing and your city's falling apart, and nothing ever seems to change, it's gonna get hard to see the funny side. It feels like perpetuating all that bullshit to even call them on it: U**gh, I can't believe you can no longer laugh at these things for my entertainment. They sound as weary as anyone would.
