Perfect Pussy, Say Yes to Love – review

The musical inferno that is Perfect Pussy found its roots in a somewhat curious manner, when ex-Shoppers frontwoman Meredith Graves was approached by a film director to perform the part of a local punk band in big-budget film Adult World. With a troupe of fellow New York hardcore/noise locals, Perfect Pussy was born, slowly metamorphosing from fake band to real band. They’ve since made a highly lauded appearance at SXSW and unleashed their debut full-length record, Say Yes to Love, which has pinned a menagerie of evocative adjectives to its collar – “cathartic”, “propulsive”, “frantic” and “exhausting”, among them.

Say Yes to Love leaps out like a heart attack from the get-go. The frantic drumming at the wheel of opening track ‘Driver’ hurtles forward along clacking railroad tracks like a loose steam train. Spitting and spluttering, vocal bursts explode across distorted guitar like firecrackers. As ‘Big Stars’ fades out, we receive a brief ebbing of the crash-tide, and then it ramps up again with the boundless momentum of ‘Work’.

‘Advance Upon the Real’, the only track to notch even remotely close to the five-minute mark, begins as another breathless, lung-pounding spectacle before collapsing into three-and-a-half minutes of ennui. This quiet, barely-there buzz washes over itself as though coming down from speed on a Sunday morning, lilting gently like a loose wall poster by the breeze of the open window. Final track ‘VII’ is the slow crawl back to life, an overwhelming mess of television static, robotic voices and dark space matter.

Say Yes To Love is a tense knot of energy, a quivering wire ready to snap. It performs a jaw-dropping feat of musical stamina, bursting forth like a burning star and dying out with a real bang, leaving tiny hypercharged sparks orbiting restlessly in its wake.

It’s out now on Pod, via Inertia.

Perfect Pussy, Say Yes to Love review by Chloe Mayne