There’s noise-rock and there’s noise-rock. Or, more to the point, there are bands that can do crunchy, angular and tricksily atonal in a functional manner, and there are bands that make you feel like you’re being dragged across barbed wire and into a private hell. Couch Slut are, most definitely, the latter.
Their fourth album, You Could Do It Tonight, is weird, difficult and offhandedly shocking. Fiction and reality blur in uncomfortable ways as the quintet recount tales of hauntings, assaults, self-harm, bad drugs and worse sex. Awful things are recounted with a malevolent chuckle, while humdrum occurrences are delivered as though a death sentence is being pronounced. Unsane, The Jesus Lizard, Made Out Of Babies and Cherubs are all waypoints, but they’ve been sandblasted by mutant strains of sludge, art-rock and acid-washed black metal.
The record retains the rabid, gnashing energy that made 2020’s Take A Chance On Rock ‘n’ Roll such a crowd pleaser, but everything has been refined and torqued to the point of absolute airlessness. The Big Riffs are bloated and inelegant, oozing from one note to the next like the last fatty deposits that slowly close off an artery. The Small Riffs, meanwhile, are lithe and keen: sharp, bright splinters that manage to lodge themselves under your skin no matter how gingerly you approach them. This mix of vulgar, system-shock wallop and avant smarts is unnerving and disorientating, a relentless attack that’s impossible to parry as it drags you from the arthouse to the wretched shit-stink of the sewer.
Megan Osztrosits remains the band’s ultimate weapon. To call her voice ‘caustic’ just doesn’t do it justice: each flinch-inducing vocal scrape is like having hot bleach injected into your eye, and when she addresses you in more conversational terms – as on ‘The Donkey’ – it’s barely any better. Here she pours out uncommon, unkind confessionals: tall tales better suited to some sour-smelling 3 AM barroom or the psychic no man’s land of the Sunday morning night bus.
The odd, jazzy, spoken-word interlude of ‘Presidential Welcome’ (which has guitarist Amy Mills playing trumpet and features Steve Blanco of fellow Brooklynites Imperial Triumphant on piano) is the only borderline-breathable moment to be found. But what you’re taking in is far from healthy – it’s a short, bitter gasp amid all the cudgel-smash brutality and swirling, mischief-eyed elegance.
As the album closes out, Osztrosits mumbles “when all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s an old saying for sure, but it also rings true: Couch Slut are the hammer, and every single listener in their path is but another nail to be driven down.
