Take A Chance On Rock 'n' Roll

Album review

If rock 'n' roll was not just a musical movement but a cultural revolution—a rhetorical, artistic, symbolic, and sometimes even physical riot against the conservative norms and power structures of the status quo—then Take A Chance On Rock 'n' Roll is an extremely ironic title. Both musically and lyrically, the sophomore record from New York's Couch Slut is a merciless torching of everything that rock 'n' roll ultimately maintained and even propelled despite its progressive facade: specifically, the unspeakable fantasies of sexually violent men.

Frontwoman Megan Osztrosits is less of a traditional metal vocalist than she is an experimental storyteller who prefers to scream her tales rather than speak them. Her delivery merges the palpable catharsis of noise-rock and the profuse heaviness of sludge metal, and her bandmates toe more or less the same line with their instruments. The songs on Rock 'n' Roll are so blaringly loud that it takes a few seconds to realize what any given part is, and by the time you do it's already shifted somewhere new: slamming noise rock, careening death metal, woodchipping hardcore, or sludge as thick as wet cement. Osztrosits isn't even screaming on the beat most of the time, letting descriptive sentences hang in the air before she finishes them a measure or two later, somehow making these already sickening tales feel even more visceral.

Most, if not all of them, are about harrowing experiences she's had at the behest of despicable men. "The Stupid Man" is a knotty sludge song about being stricken by a violently abusive drug addict, whereas "In A Pig's Eye" channels the desperate fury of being belittled and victim-blamed by police during a sexual assault investigation. Others are even darker. In the dizzying "I'm 14," Osztrosits vividly recounts the manager of a piercing parlor giving her 14-year-old self hard drugs before illegally piercing her genitals. The closer, "Someplace Cheap," somehow finds dark humor in a story about being drugged and assaulted by middle-age bikers in the middle of rural Ohio. Take a Chance On Rock 'n' Roll is a hard listen but it's a rewarding one. Musically, it rattles the cage of many of metal's stale tropes, and lyrically it sees Osztrosits on a righteous warpath to threaten those who've inflicted her with a lifetime of trauma. Take a chance on Couch Slut.  © Eli Enis/Qobuz