Couch Slut
You Could Do It Tonight
BRUTAL PANDA
Maybe it doesn’t mean much to the uninitiated, but to the growing fanbase Couch Slut has amassed over the past decade with their Lehigh Valley–gothic lyrical take on noise rock, hearing Megan Osztrosits intro “The Donkey” by enthusiastically saying “Here’s what happened when my friends and I got fired from the haunted waterpark” is about as exciting as Sufjan singing about another Midwestern state. By closing 2020’s Take a Chance on Rock ’n’ Roll with the NYC-based band’s most fully realized vision of Couch Slut as an outlet for Osztrosits to unpack her rolodex of narratives that sound like some of the more outlandish rumors that circulated your rural-PA high school in a tone of bug-eyed disbelief, the tone was aptly set for You Could Do It Tonight.
It feels like Couch Slut understand what their strong suits are more than ever on their fourth full-length. Not only are there two tracks among the nine that make up their debut for Brutal Panda which rival the X-rated campfire lyrical quality of “Someplace Cheap,” but the band even released an abridged version of one of those tracks, “The Donkey,” as one of the record’s lead singles—lopping off the extended epilogue completely either as a bid for radio airplay (this is a joke; I’ll get to the band’s brutal take on sludge metal in a moment) or as a statement in defiance of artists increasingly showing their full hands by the time their album drops.
On the opposite end of that spectrum, the band announced the record with lead single “Ode to Jimbo,” an incendiary noise-rock instrumental burying the lead vocals beneath a thick slab of sludgey riffs as Osztrosits’ lyrics unexpectedly take the form of a love song (albeit for a bar). More unexpected yet is the frantic outro wherein wailing guitar and bass commingle under Osztrosits’ whispers to create a surreal sonic space akin to the atmospheric furies explored in the most climactic and terrifying corners of Sumac’s massive canvases. It’s one of many details across the LP—such as the death metal growls undergirding the DIY-tour-gone-terribly-wrong opener “Couch Slut Lewis,” or the jingle bells enlivening the Christmas-Eve-gone-terribly-wrong “Laughing and Crying”—that make each song wholly distinct from each and other and from the prior entrants in the Couch Slut discography. You know, aside from the very specific evils being outlined in each track’s lyric page.
It almost feels like the band was inspired by how well that whole Chat Pile thing went over a few years ago, moving them to fully commit to turning their competitively deranged take on a typically unfriendly subgenre into a more lived-in insular universe informed by slightly different industrial-rock bands from the ’90s (not to mention slightly different drugs), all while expressing life as we know it as a visceral horror story. It may not be a pleasant listen, but what did you expect from an ode to straight razors?
