Review Summary: Never mind the kleenex, here's the Tissues.
Managing expectations chapter 72. You can’t imagine my excitement when I heard the first few bonk bonk bonk pulses of The Tissues “Paint Me Black” last year, I convinced myself that this could be a Kleenex tribute band. A quartet from Los Angeles ¾ female playing this type of music and a name like “The Tissues”?? It seemed inevitable that someone took up the gauntlet of Regula, Marlene and their gang of Swiss sockdolagers AND IT’S ABOUT TIME. But in all fairness, The Tissues are far too talented to be tagged any kind of worship band. Their sawed-off percussive trots and obtuse guitar shapes capped off with the Kristine Nevrose’s spastic polemics are very much their own animal. Moreover, I need to get a life.
A few self-help books and lots of deep yoga breaths later, my false judgement was all but licked. Then out of nowhere, their latest record has a couple of songs that sound like Kleenex. It sent me spiraling back down depressive alleyways , ordering carry-out, calling out sick so I could crash out on the couch with a mud-mask on, smashed on low-cal seltzers and watered-down margaritas, “Nighttoad” and “Ü “ having their way with me on an endless loop. This band exhausts me. I’ll be ok – but keep the cards and emails coming. Thoughts and prayers, guys.
“Blue Film” is a ten-song shot of dagger-twisting electro-(s)punk. It’s completely addictive from the very first listen, appallingly simple but these songs snap and bite at your ankles until they’ve seized your full attention Before you know it, the thing has played out three times. The rhythm section of Bianca Ayala (b) and Tara Edwards (dr) are unappreciated architects building the sandcastles that that Jerry’s guitar and Kristine’s vocals destroy with cirrus oscillations and straitjacket tantrums. “Do You Want to Be My Lover Tonight” and “Intermission” poison Kleenex’s Kool-Aid with dark swirls of 90’s noise pop. But the tour de force is “Rear Window”, an art-punk masterpiece of slashing guitars and mad caterwauling that’ll have you bumping into the furniture in no time flat. Copious doses of jaunty poetics and social commentary reward the earlooker patient enough to untangle Nevrose’s hysterical meowing about intergalactic salt shakers and hysterectomies, but I’m too emotionally invested to look under the hood.
Needless to say, “Blue Film” is one of the more pleasant surprises of 2020 so far. More on my cathartic neuroses and miscellaneous tailspins in future reviews. Buy it.
