Screaming Females' 2012 album, Ugly, was a brazen arrangement of squeals, wails, and howls. Their new Rose Mountain, like the title suggests, pretties up the guitar rock trio's grotesque side. Since Ugly, Screaming Females have reworked their songwriting process, poring over the nuts and bolts of each composition. Marissa Paternoster, the band's vocalist and guitarist, also spent months fighting off a nasty bout of mono, and chronicled the sterile boredom of doctor's offices in a slew of new songs. Rose Mountain might be Screaming Females' most deliberate music yet, but it lacks much of their former wildness.
What it's missing in ragged edges, the band's sixth studio album makes up for in force. Matt Bayles produced the record, and part of the change in mood comes from the strange way he slots Paternoster's guitar. He's more of a metal guy, having worked with Mastodon, Isis, and Russian Circles; in his hands, Screaming Females' frayed chords clump up into solid blocks. Rather than a backbone, King Mike's basslines feel more like walls enclosing the whole sound into a smaller space. At times, the songs sound choked by the professionalism of their own treatment.
Though her voice falls lower in the mix this time, Paternoster still pounds home powerhouses like "Empty Head", whose chorus packs a blunt and heavy punch. But she's dropped the sneer on the edge of her words. On Ugly's "Rotten Apple", she sings the line "I'm a rotten apple" six times at every chorus, and each one feels bound up in a new irony. Her singing remains skilled and idiosyncratic, but on Rose Mountain, she plays things straight. Even her lyrics lose some of their sense of play; on "Wishing Well", Paternoster imagines the titular change receptacle as a portal straight to hell, a clunky image compared to, say, Kim Deal's lean, evocative turn of phrase ("spitting in a wishing well") on "Cannonball".
Even when Rose Mountain addresses sickness directly, its tone keeps closer to the ennui of a waiting room thick with the smell of hand sanitizer than the stifled pain of a blood draw in the exam room. On "Ripe", Paternoster sings, "Peel the skin raw/ Pinch till the feeling's gone," while the instrumentation around her—the stifled distortion, the clipped drums—sounds more numbing than painful.
They're still young, but Screaming Females have carved out their own corner in this century's take on guitar rock. It's hard to fault them for going clean, but it's easy to miss the happy accidents they stumbled upon when they weren't so worried about keeping within the lines. For an album about how bodies can betray us with their chaos, Rose Mountain sounds remarkably groomed.
