Upset frontwoman Ali Koehler has wandered through a fair share of the nine lives that often accompany the personnel-shuffling, lo-fi garage-pop world in which she's developed her reputation. Most recently she was the drummer for Best Coast, until a messy split (one on which she and frontwoman Bethany Cosentino publicly disagreed); before that, she cut her teeth as Frankie Rose's successor on drums in the ranks of the Vivian Girls. The rest of the band has likewise been places: lead guitarist Jenn Prince is a Vivian Girls contemporary, too, one who plays guitar occasionally in "Kickball" Katy Goodman's side project La Sera; and drummer Patty Schemel—well, the former Hole drummer needs little introduction.
So it's noteworthy that Upset, on their first full-length, with Koehler at the helm of her own ship, should rewind the clock. From its opening lines to its resolved close, She's Gone is a whirlwind of instantly likeable do-overs: uncomplicated, sticky-catchy pop punk songs about small-picture woes that place the trio squarely back into sprightly, if dissatisfied, teenaged bodies. With songs like opener "Back to School" and the simple-progressioned "About Me", it's as though Koehler hunted down a time machine to travel to the early 2000s, intent upon rewriting that era's commercial pop-punk history with some decidedly more DIY and feminist ethics. "Queen Frosteen", a simple song about adolescent female rivalry ("Queen Frosteen, my enemy/ She's everything, I'm nobody") is "If You C Jordan" for the Rookie crowd; "Never Wanna" is a speedbagging lament about shy crushes that's equipped to handle New Found Glory crowds. The record's 36 minutes are the sugary product one would expect from a new Vivian Girl-meets-Hole experiment, with a spunky roughness around the edges that endears them—perhaps intentionally—to both a young crowd and one that could've used a record like this when they were the young crowd.
The sound of three well-vetted female musicians tearing through topics like rivals and drinking and following your dreams and kicking bad habits would, if they were coming from the band's male analogs, easily come off as manchild-y; at times these qualities do poke through Upset's scratchy tapestry. (Koehler and Prince are, after all, in their mid-20s; Schemel, whose powerful contributions to Upset originated in a Twitter-facilitated friendship with Koehler, is 46.) The set can feel a bit skeletal in its offerings, like a demo that got pushed through too quickly, and like the sugar rush of any pop punk, sometimes their dedication to the aesthetic loses its flavor—"Don't Lose Your Dinosaur" is cute but waxes a bit saccharine in a Reading Rainbow, follow-your-dreams kind of way ("If it means that much to you/ Don't give up what you're meant to do," "Don't lose your dinosaur/ 'Cause there's always more where that came from")—but the immediacy of the subject matter seems more revisionist than immature.
All said, She's Gone is delightfully restless teenaged guitar-pop made by grown, well-traveled women, the contrast of which necessarily adds a sheen of introspection over the whole affair. Its depth impresses itself in spots like the deepened instrumental break on "Phone Calls", the album's most fleshed-out track, giving the album an intentionality that its contemporaries, both past and present, often lack. (It's fitting that Kyle Gilbride of comrades-in-pluck Swearin' produced She's Gone, and that Don Giovanni Records would happily add it to their close-knit, youthful artillery of conscious punk.) The potential those moments bring is palpable, and that low-key maturity, the one that keeps She's Gone from being another delicious-yet-slapdash addition to an already replete base of teen angst, builds a platform from which the band will eventually and easily catch up with their adult selves.
