Chastity Belt, Strange Ranger

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Beto Barkmo

Chastity Belt

Weaving together iconic Pacific Northwest sounds like the call-and-response harmonies of Sleater-Kinney and the moody melodies of Black Belt Eagle Scout, Chastity Belt’s latest, self-titled LP showcases jangly, droning guitars, dreamy vocals and heartfelt, intelligent lyrics. The result is an album tailor-made for a cloudy autumn day. With fellow Pacfic Northwesterners Strange Ranger.

Free.

press release: Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 8PM @ Der Rathskeller

Acclaimed Seattle band Chastity Belt have returned with their first new music since 2017's I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone. This heartfelt new record, simply titled Chastity Belt, is due out on Friday, September 20, on LP, CD, digital and cassette from Hardly Art records, and from Milk! records in Australia and New Zealand. Chastity Belt was co-produced by the band and Melina Duterte aka Jay Som. 

Chastity Belt are sharing "Elena," the second single from this new record, which features vocalists Lydia Lund and Julia Shapiro exchanging winsome harmonies over a bed of lush instrumentals.

Bassist Annie Truscott says of the song, “Over the past year, we all read and loved Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. We individually related to the ways in which the main character’s sense of self is inextricably linked to her desire for love and validation both from lovers and friends. The overlapping voices on top of the whimsical wave-like instrumentals captures the universal feeling of having a conversation with yourself about yourself.”The band will be touring extensively this fall in Europe and North America in support of the record.

Chastity Belt’s energy is like a circuit, circling around the silly and the sincere. Tongue-in-cheek shit-shooting and existential rumination feed into each other infinitely.

Theirs is a long-term relationship, and that loop sustains them. That’s a creative thesis in and of itself, but isn’t that also just the mark of a true-blue friendship?  

The band talks a lot about intention these days—how to be more present with each other. The four piece—Julia Shapiro (vocals, guitar, drums), Lydia Lund (vocals, guitar), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals, guitar) and Annie Truscott (bass)—is nine years deep in this, after all. It seems now, more than ever, that circuit is a movement of intentionality, one that creates a space inside which they can be themselves, among themselves. It’s a space where the euphoria of making music with your best friends is protected from the outside world’s churning expectations. It’s a kind of safe zone for the band to occupy as their best selves: a group of friends who love each other.  

Their fourth record, Chastity Belt, comes out of that safe space. After a restorative few months on hiatus in 2018, each member worked on solo material or toured with other bands. “So much of the break was reminding ourselves to stay present, and giving ourselves permission to stop without saying when were gonna meet up again,” says guitarist Lydia Lund. “It was so important to have that—not saying, ‘we’re gonna get back together at this point,’ but really just open it up so we could get back to our present connection.”  

Their experience navigating adult life within the strange seasons of the music industry has Chastity Belt orienting themselves towards whatever gets them to feel the most present with each other, in any part of the band grind. With the luxury of spending several weeks in the studio with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, Chastity Belt was able to experiment. The new self-titled album is the work of the band playing “old songs, and trying new things on top of it,” like adding more dynamic harmonies and violin, says bassist Annie Truscott. Lydia, Gretchen, and Julia all share lead vocals on different tracks on the album. The result is their most sonically developed and nuanced record yet; one that’s not only a product of, but a series of reflections on what it means to take what you need and to understand yourself better.  

Many of Chastity Belt’s signature dynamics, from the silly to the sincere, have read as feminist gestures: the Cool Slut DGAF-iness, the shrugging off of the “women in rock” press gargle, the fundamentally punk act of creating music on your own as a woman, and being lyrically forthright. What the making of Chastity Belt reveals is that the band has tapped into a deeper tradition of women making art on their terms: the act of self-preservation in favor of the long game. In favor of each other. In this cultural moment, taking space like this to prioritize the love over the product seems progressive. Chastity Belt’s intentions have resulted in an album deeply expressive of four people’s commitment to what they love most: making music with each other.

https://chastity-belt.bandcamp.com/

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On their third full-length Remembering The Rockets (out 7/26 via Tiny Engines), Strange Ranger continue to excel at translating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releases across their 10 years as a band, the Philly-via-Portland-via-Montana group, currently featuring Isaac Eiger (guitars, vocals), Fred Nixon (bass, piano, vocals), Nathan Tucker (drums), and Fiona Woodman (vocals), have traversed genres, moods, and textures while maintaining one important throughline: an exploration of closeness.  

"Trying to close the distance between yourself and another person and wondering how much can really be done about that gap," Eiger says. "Sometimes you don't want to be close with others but you feel guilty, and sometimes you do but you can't."  

Their 2016 double-LP Rot Forever (which they released under the name Sioux Falls) was a 72-minute freakout that paired Built To Spill grandiosity with early Modest Mouse intensity. Many of the songs were six-minute treks that pushed guitar/bass/drum indie-rock to its breaking point, but the band was singing about crawling into bed and running back a lifetime's worth of minor interactions.  

After putting that into the world, Eiger and Nixon (the primary songwriters) felt they had gotten a rip-roaring rock record out of their systems, so they hung up their distortion pedals and traded caustic yelps for Alex G-esque croons on 2017's Daymoon (Tiny Engines). It was a synth-adorned, insular bedroom-pop record that floated rather than soared, and they opted for lyrical impressionism over the hyper-specific outbursts of Rot Forever.  

On both albums, Eiger's writing style reads like a loose assembly of quotes from conversations he's had with others (some trivial, some extremely confessional) spliced with his own, private introspections. He asks a lot of questions in his music, often with no traditional context or exposition, which forces the listener to fill in the blanks between the visual details ("I thought you talked to the reporter / she had a polka dot recorder") and the dialogue ("how was work, are you okay? / how's your mom, is she the same?") to either understand his story, or project your own encounters onto his.  

Eiger, who writes the bulk of Strange Ranger's lyrics, is a modern master of conveying the anxiety and uncertainty of growing older through a mixture of childhood nostalgia and interpersonal tidbits. There's plenty of that on Remembering The Rockets, but after all of these years of singing about his own coming-of-age story, the album approaches the quandary of whether he'll ever be able to impart that process-through which he's reaped so much artistic joy and curiosity-onto someone else.