Spectreview: Chastity Belt – Chastity Belt

-ELECTRIC INDIGO-

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“You can have everything you always dreamed of
But first you gotta get out of your head”

Chastity Belt eternally operate under cover of darkness, or perhaps within the confines of it. Since No Regerts first spread like wildfire across underground listening communities, the Seattle band has committed themselves to telling stories of living within roped-off walls, of inextricable emotional ties to friends and lovers and endless days anchored by clouded, bitter hearts. The underlying argument they present is that, at default, we live life as bystanders viewing our struggles from the sidelines; if there’s hope present, it’s in the notion that one day things will get better of their own accord, even as the cycle begins anew. This passivity is reflected back in their music: heavy, melodious, effortless indie rock songs weighed down by years of internalization. Chastity Belt, their new self-titled LP, doesn’t challenge this notion: despite being their most luxurious-sounding offering yet (in part thanks to production by Jay Som’s Melinda Duterte) it’s a further decrescendo from the band’s punk origins that continues to replace anxious tempos and trebly chords with restrained dynamics and soft, dark textures.

If the band has historically sounded like ocean swimmers trying to keep their heads above the rising tide, this LP finds them completely underwater, their bodies subject to the torrents and eddies of daily life. It’s a shift in sound that both a logical continuation of 2017’s I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone and a neat pair with Julia Shapiro’s recent debut solo album, and even though it’s lacking in energy, the band makes up for it in nuance. Its best songs, which happen to come early, act as voyeuristic mini-epics that gain power not by any obvious amplification but by the strength in their songwriting. “Ann’s Jam” is an carefully-constructed reverie about youthful innocence that embodies the word “bittersweet,” and in Shapiro’s plaintive insight and its patient unfurling it’s undoubtedly one of their finest moments, potentially as effective a closer as it is an opener here. “Elena” maintains that stormy air, though its power comes from standing right at the precipice of epiphany, lurching back into its elliptical verse right when the chorus threatens to break the cycle. Indeed, Chastity Belt is full of places where Shapiro, along with fellow lyricist Lydia Lund, present characters that are lucid to their obstacles but feel powerless to overcome them, from the plight of the misunderstood in “Drown” to the envy of another’s mental freedom in “Pissed Pants”. These are sentiments repeated in different ways over the course of the record, but it might be easy to miss these details on first listen. Sonically, the record is a constant wash over the ears that doesn’t make a lot of time for genuinely engaging moments, without much than a stray guitar solo near the end rising above the din. Songs like “Effort” and “Half-hearted” seem to fly by without much in the way of memorability, and even after repeated listens there are still a significant number of tracks that have a hard time sticking. Taken together, it feels more like a moment of complacency than an opportunity for the band, who are now at a higher level of career exposure than ever, to challenge themselves artistically. That being said, Chastity Belt still works very well as a sublime mood record, and in its downcast resolvedness it decidedly upholds the band’s role as one of Seattle’s premier musical ambassadors.

Recommended for the Dark Wet.