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Couch Slut’s aesthetic was firmly established on their debut album, My Life as a Woman, the cover of which featured a black-and-white drawing of a man ejaculating onto a woman’s face. Leandro De Cotis’s artwork is as integral to the band’s branding as Raymond Pettibon’s was for Black Flag’s in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Couch Slut’s music depicts a life so cruel that survival seems like a victory, but it also features a feminist undercurrent, distinguishing it from that of their male edgelord precursors.
Couch Slut doesn’t push their lyrics to the forefront. The vocals are mixed low, and lead singer Megan Ostrozits tends toward a feral cry or alternates between speaking and screaming on tracks like “The Donkey,” from the band’s fourth album, You Could Do It Tonight. Sexual assault and self-harm are recurrent themes throughout the eight songs here: “My leg’s infected from all these scratches,” Ostrozits sings on “Downhill Racer.”
The title of “Wilkinson’s Sword,” inspired by a brand of razorblades, alludes to a teenage girl stealing disposable scalpels from her doctor’s office. “Is it so wrong to want a little warmth from your own red blanket?” she wonders. It’s one of the few songs that settle into a groove, courtesy of Theo Nobel’s booming drums (which, compared to Amy Mills and Dylan DiLella’s overdubbed guitars, are less prominent throughout the rest of the album’s thick, sludgy mix).
Couch Slut’s brand of noise rock would be unbearably bleak if not for their empathy for the young women at the center of their songs, not to mention their taste for gallows humor. “I’d like to welcome you to the second side of Couch Slut’s fourth album,” visual artist Joseph Bone, whose work is included in the deluxe vinyl package of the album, intones on “Presidential Welcome,” accompanied by piano and trumpet. He then adds, self-deprecatingly: “I used to be a set of words/Sitting in a dusty desk/Waiting one day to be rescued…I have failed.” It’s a surprising but welcome brief moment of levity on a decidedly grim album.
You Could Do It Tonight embraces such discomfort. Like Big Black’s songs about Midwestern teens who are so bored that they set each other on fire and watch cattle being slaughtered for kicks, Couch Slut’s music exposes the rot beneath the skin of American life. Combining metal with the nasty post-hardcore that Robert Christgau once dubbed “pigfucker music,” the album gives voice to female rage in a way that finds truth in the ugliness.
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