When Tacocat first entered indie rock’s collective consciousness, “pastel goth” and flasks laminated in Lisa Frank stickers were very cool, and “resting bitch face” had yet to become a pop-feminism cliché. The Seattle-based four-piece came up in perhaps the simpler times of the early 2010s. Consistent but not exactly prolific, Tacocat could’ve easily fallen into the trap of sounding like any other unabashedly twee group that ripened in the first half of the decade. Thankfully, This Mess Is a Place, the group’s fourth record and their first for Sub Pop, is a forward-thinking pop-punk that successfully—albeit narrowly—manages to dodge the obvious pitfalls.
On This Mess Is a Place, Tacocat play with a familiar set of girl-group and grunge-rock influences, adding inklings of straight-up pop. Album opener “Hologram” is a sort of Dressy Bessy meets the Marine Girls situation, with goopy, multi-part harmonies and saccharine guitars. The song asks the big questions in life: “How did we come to be so jaded?” and, “Is numb even a feeling?” Instead of answering these profundities with equally anesthetized sonics, the band’s pure indie bubblegum does the exact opposite. If Tacocat feel life is stagnant and stale, their own art might be the antidote.
Tacocat have always encapsulated the kind of cheerfully campy aesthetic that encourages “shoveling yourself out of the shit” on bad days. They make fun music in a time when goofing off seems almost antediluvian, and being earnest is worse. On “New World,” a song as sugary as shotgunned Mountain Dew, Tacocat ask listeners to imagine waking up to beauty, rather than dread. Life might suck, lead vocalist Emily Nokes seems to say, but what if for one day it didn’t? “I woke up today/And all my friends were happy/No one to tell them when to stop,” she sings with an affect that is both wry and daring, as bandmates join in with jaunty rockabilly rhythms. “Rose-Colored Sky” brings Tacocat’s feminist sensibilities to the forefront. Though it sounds unsettlingly cheery, the song roasts the ambivalent rich who get “first prize just to participate,” turning a lazy explanation of millennial malaise back on the real threat: people wholly uninterested in politics so long as the world looks good to them.
That’s not to say Tacocat don’t indulge in fun for fun’s sake, which sometimes makes for surface-level songwriting. “Meet Me at La Palma” is, after all, a song about getting wasted on giant margaritas and dancing “the foxtrot” with someone who just broke an engagement, and there’s not much more to it than that. Tacocat has released songs with similar content throughout the past decade, writing music that’s consistently both sloppy and serious. Sometimes they trust the formula a little too much, and This Mess Is a Place can occasionally feel overly safe. But at other moments, the album radiates sneakily subversive fuck-you attitude. Most of the time, it feels like taking a joyride with four bonafide party experts egging you on as you drunk-text an ex. It’s fun and messy and you might forget it completely by the next day. No regrets, though.
