Sadie Switchblade, the lead singer of the Olympia hardcore band G.L.O.S.S., once framed her side project Dyke Drama as a balancing force to that musical violence. “[It’s] pretty transparent,” she said. “The songs are either about trans girl problems or dykey lesbionic friendships.” The recent G.L.O.S.S. EP Trans Day of Revenge dices seven minutes into five tracks; their riffs taper off like a nail’s sharpened tip. On Up Against the Bricks, Switchblade’s second solo album, anger tends to remain interior, rendering the narrator sardonic in defeat. (“Dyke Drama” can be read as a meaningful shrug.) The closest thing to an anthem here promises: “You can’t count on me/I ain’t no sure thing.” Outside hardcore’s vital extremes, the thrill of materials straining against structure, Switchblade has space enough to pause inside ambivalence.
G.L.O.S.S. is an acronym for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” and their music is about surviving in a world that believes your existence illegitimate. Dyke Drama songs describe a life lived on top of that, the resigned longing, the bruise you can’t stop touching, the scene of the crying. The title track uses radical iconography to chalk off lost years: “Is it too late for dreaming? To go back to believing?/To push me up against the bricks, grab my skull and kiss my lips?” No longer screaming to keep up, Switchblade’s voice moves between frustration and abandon—the circuit that electrifies so many pop-punk songs. Returning to words over and over, she gives paradoxical shape to a not-quite-relationship: “I don’t wanna stop, I don’t wanna stop/ Wasting my time, wasting my time, on you, on you.” I thought of the character from one Alan Hollinghurst novel who senses “the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance.”
Up Against the Bricks may be a solo release, but it also affords Switchblade the chance to place other musicians in her design. The backing vocals are all sung by her roommate Erica Leshon and Joey Seward, and you can hear the close acoustics surrounding them. Harmonies slide almost unconsciously behind and ahead of each other. On “Cis Girls,” a grimacing snapshot of the ornamental status trans women often receive even amidst queer spaces, Leshon’s voice takes over the lyric—one of those girls, one of “those girls, one of those, one of those girls”—as if to ostracize Switchblade from her own song. “Some Days I Load My Gun” considers suicide in disturbingly straightforward terms; imagine “Everybody Hurts” with every gentle consolation drained away, leaving only the crushing weight of the fact. At the end Switchblade is barely still audible, overwhelmed by Seward’s droning organ, a single bright note held until it blinds.
The looseness of bar-band rock pardons drunks and licenses the strange. Dyke Drama can spare the time to develop lyrics like “Day-for-Night,” describing a turbulent family as the kind of scene that film directors correct from morning to twilight. But that organ suggests Switchblade is drawn to other genres entirely. Up Against the Bricks finds her covering “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” a song Lucinda Williams recorded for her self-titled 1988 album, and it’s about as reverent as punk gets. (Any irony that attaches to the line “you were staying in a big hotel” must be self-deprecating.) Switchblade rephrases the rueful original in hoarse and frantic cadences, as if she were jabbing elevator buttons out of desperation. Who could lie down and relax with so many doors to listen through?
