Punk rock has long been an outlet for both physical and emotional release—and few people exploit the full limits of its cathartic potential like Kylee Kimbrough. As both the lead singer and drummer for Atlanta-bred noise-punk outfit Dasher, she gets to have it both ways: she can imagine her enemies’ faces on the skins that she’s bashing, while finishing them off with a fire-breathing scream. She performs with the sort of intensity that makes you check your hands for phantom splinters and blood blisters, while instinctively rubbing your throat to soothe your vicarious laryngitis. But on Dasher’s debut album, the most lasting wounds aren’t so much physical as psychological.
Sodium is a brief, blunt album with a long, tumultuous history. It was first previewed with a couple of singles back in 2014, and momentum was building toward the album’s seemingly imminent release. But then Dasher suddenly fell apart, the recordings were scrapped, and, following a series of personal setbacks, Kimbrough relocated to Bloomington to decompress and be closer to her label, Jagjaguwar. After acclimatizing herself to the local scene, Kimbrough gradually rebuilt her band from scratch, trading up from a power trio to a fearsome foursome. So naturally, on Sodium, Dasher go back on the attack like a feral, foamy-mouthed dog with an empty stomach and a full bladder after being cooped up in a kennel all day.
With opening salvo “We Know So,” Dasher instantly establish Sodium’s murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls—the same sort of volatile chemistry that powered the earliest assaults of a pre-1979 Death From Above, or the primordial, phlegm-balled blasts of the Men circa Leave Home. And like those bands, Dasher also manage to carve out space for melody amid the melee—you may not always understand what Kimbrough is shouting about in her verses, but she makes sure to broadcast her choruses loud and clear for maximum fist-pump potential. In a 2016 interview, Kimbrough admitted that lyrics are a secondary concern for her, and that she chooses words for their percussive effect as much as their meaning. Certainly, one shouldn’t try to parse any socio-political commentary about the current state of America in righteous ragers like “Soviet” or “Go Rambo” (both of which date back to 2014). And Sodium’s sludgy title track is about friendship and the perils of adding too much salt to one’s diet. (“Totino’s!/Potatoes!/Ramen noodles!/Sodium! Sodium!”)
But on “Teeth,” Kimbrough uses the album’s most serene soundscape—a woozy, discordant psychedelia that imagines a blackgaze Pixies—to deliver her harshest words: “You! Can’t! Save! Me!” It’s the most telling indicator of the deeper distress fueling Dasher’s circle-pit hysterics, and by the time we reach the album’s second side, the emotional bloodletting has become as overwhelming as the band’s jet-turbine roar. The Texan-hardcore stomper “Eye See” is a post-breakup lament drunk on self-loathing that soon curdles into desperation: “Don’t you! Know how! Much I! Miss You!/I feel! Sick when! I can’t! Touch you!” And the harrowing “Trespass” applies a term for breaching property lines to the violation of physical ones: “My body is not yours!” Kimbrough roars, before rendering the exchange in more explicit terms: “Hey, you fucking piece of shit/My blood is all over your dick/You put the knife up to my wrist.”
In its wake, “No Guilt” functions as an exorcism of sorts, as Kimbrough unleashes her demons through overlapping, strangulated vocal parts overtop a queasy, sandblasted groove. “No guilt! No shame!,” she shrieks in the song’s dying seconds, as if using up the very last ounce of muscle strength in her larynx. Sodium is liable to leave you just as drained as its creator, but it’s the sort of exhaustion that feels valorous and victorious. After all, losing your voice is a small price to pay for saving your sanity.
