Couch Slut
My Life as a Woman [10th Anniversary Remaster]
BRUTAL PANDA
Not since Pussy Galore moved down from Brown University to NYC and brought their rough garage freakouts with them has way-loud, manufactured noise sounded as great, damning, disgusted, and dangerous as it does in the hands of Couch Slut—or caused as much controversy, if we’re comparing Pussy Galore’s mostly unspeakable album title Dial ‘M’ for Motherfucker and Couch Slut’s immediately censored album cover for 2014’s My Life as a Woman with its graphic cock-sucking imagery. Unsubtle and unhinged, Couch Slut and their lead yeller and lyricist Megan O are uninterested in talking prisoners or maintaining safety, least of all for themselves.
Now wrapped in brown paper so to hide its shamed sleeve, My Life as a Woman has undergone a clean-up for their Brutal Panda label’s 10th Anniversary Remaster (courtesy of Matt Colton, the producer who’s made Sunn O))) shine), in league with the frazzled clarity and feminist rage of their newest album, 2024’s You Could Do It Tonight. Sex as anger; sex as assault; sex as something not sex at all, but rather psyche-scarring, weaponized, combative and criminal—all of this figures into the chant that howls at the center of the moldy metal that is “Replacement Addiction” (can you sing a chorus of “Anal fissure / Fucking murder / Burning fissure / Goodbye ego”?) and the creepy rant-haiku “Little Girl Things.” It would be easy to listen to the mellow-harshing “Lust Chamber” and guess that its focus is a BDSM dungeon, yet something tells me that lyrics such as “You’re gonna make mistakes / Every slave does / I don’t like repeat offenders / It gets me very upset” cut way deeper than archetypal kink.
The scream and moaning that fill the slow-hammering, feedback-filled “Rape Kit” is impossible to make out, save for the phrase “one more time.” Three listens at six minutes each and I’m not sure I want to know what it is, exactly, save for understanding its primal infuriation and deep-set wound. Hard to listen to, but impossible to turn away from, the entirety of Couch Slut’s My Life as a Woman doesn’t seem like a record that you’d host an anniversary party for. And yet, in a year where pop at its most innocuous passes for meaning, I recommend that you grab this and You Could Do It Tonight for an evening of pernicious rockouts.
