Locate S,1
Wicked Jaw
CAPTURED TRACKS
This isn’t a trick question: What does every artist start with when they go about creating a new piece of work, whether it be a song, a movie, a book, or a painting? If you answered “a blank canvas,” you would be correct. And, similar to therapy—a form of communication that isn’t too far removed from (and often intertwined with) making art—it’s only with a fresh slate that problems can be dealt with, both logically and artistically.
Christina Schneider goes all in with Wicked Jaw, the third record from her music project Locate S,1. She decides to share with us her story—difficult as it must be to tell—in the most sparing of styles possible, steering clear of lyrical hyperbole or excess instrumentation while proving that some broken bones can only properly heal without those two crutches. Early on in the record Schneider seems to decide that, as narrator, she’ll tell us the full story, discomfort be damned. After all, she’s the artist behind the art. “I believe that we never really lived in America / Go back to Disnee, back to the palace stairs / Back to the hiding places that were never there,” she sings on the second track.
Make no mistake about it, “Disnee” isn’t necessarily the fantasy land we thought we lived in when we were kids. As alluded to by its misspelled title, there’s something broken and unreliable in the “flight” option of “fight or flight” that will eventually have to be corrected. “Go Back to Disnee” is sandwiched between the girl-group-inspired leadoff track “You Were Right About One Thing” and “Pieta,” on which Schneider is a dead ringer for David Lynch femme fatale Julee Cruise.
Contributors to the record are a plenty, with seven other musicians lending their talents to Wicked Jaw—but the album is Schneider’s story to tell, with light-as-a-feather instrumentation framing her songs about enduring the trauma of childhood abuse. The trauma will always be there—except, maybe, for those who want to follow the whims of our escapist tendencies. As Schneider would say: “We never really lived in America.”
