Couch Slut - You Could Do It Tonight

The Quietus

There’s noise-rock and there’s noise-rock. Or, more to the point, there are bands that can do crunchy, angular and tricksily atonal in a functional manner, and there are bands that make you feel like you’re being dragged across barbed wire and into a private hell. Couch Slut are, most definitely, the latter. 

Their fourth album, You Could Do It Tonight, is weird, difficult and offhandedly shocking. Fiction and reality blur in uncomfortable ways as the quintet recount tales of hauntings, assaults, self-harm, bad drugs and worse sex. Awful things are recounted with a malevolent chuckle, while humdrum occurrences are delivered as though a death sentence is being pronounced. Unsane, The Jesus Lizard, Made Out Of Babies and Cherubs are all waypoints, but they’ve been sandblasted by mutant strains of sludge, art-rock and acid-washed black metal.

The record retains the rabid, gnashing energy that made 2020’s Take A Chance On Rock ‘n’ Roll such a crowd pleaser, but everything has been refined and torqued to the point of absolute airlessness. The Big Riffs are bloated and inelegant, oozing from one note to the next like the last fatty deposits that slowly close off an artery. The Small Riffs, meanwhile, are lithe and keen: sharp, bright splinters that manage to lodge themselves under your skin no matter how gingerly you approach them. This mix of vulgar, system-shock wallop and avant smarts is unnerving and disorientating, a relentless attack that’s impossible to parry as it drags you from the arthouse to the wretched shit-stink of the sewer.  

Megan Osztrosits remains the band’s ultimate weapon. To call her voice ‘caustic’ just doesn’t do it justice: each flinch-inducing vocal scrape is like having hot bleach injected into your eye, and when she addresses you in more conversational terms – as on ‘The Donkey’ – it’s barely any better. Here she pours out uncommon, unkind confessionals: tall tales better suited to some sour-smelling 3 AM barroom or the psychic no man’s land of the Sunday morning night bus. 

The odd, jazzy, spoken-word interlude of ‘Presidential Welcome’ (which has guitarist Amy Mills playing trumpet and features Steve Blanco of fellow Brooklynites Imperial Triumphant on piano) is the only borderline-breathable moment to be found. But what you’re taking in is far from healthy – it’s a short, bitter gasp amid all the cudgel-smash brutality and swirling, mischief-eyed elegance.

As the album closes out, Osztrosits mumbles “when all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s an old saying for sure, but it also rings true: Couch Slut are the hammer, and every single listener in their path is but another nail to be driven down.

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Couch Slut does not concern itself with the prettier things in life. While the noise rock tag may be a dead giveaway, the unconvinced need only to look at the cover of the Brooklyn five-piece’s 2014 debut My Life as a Woman (not at work) to understand. The monotone theme is a spirit likewise captured in fourth full-length You Could Do It Tonight, displaying a humanity succumbing to vice, filth, and weed – as the style’s stalwarts in Cherubs, Oxbow and Brainbombs have long done. But there’s something distinctly unhinged about Couch Slut, whether it be the jerky hardcore rhythms, dissonant squeals, and deceptively placid passages of simmering menace, the blasts of straight-up noise that feels as furious as its content, or frontwoman Megan Osztrosits’ manic shrieks, banshee howls, and ominous mutterings. Like its predecessors, You Could Do It Tonight dives headlong into darker things through the lens of urban alienation.

Unlike its predecessors, however, You Could Do It Tonight flies off the rails at nearly every turn. Compromising solidarity through its thirty-eight-minute runtime through a variety of vicious tricks, no two tracks retaining the same technique, Couch Slut dives into surreal storytelling dedicated to self-harm and suicide. Using a thick haze of noise, combined with skronky guitar work and dark bass and helmed by the manically captivating spoken stories and Osztrosits’ manic shrieks, You Could Do It Tonight is an otherworldly and absolutely menacing trip to drug-fueled insanity.

You Could Do It Tonight by Couch Slut

The two faces of You Could Do It Tonight, in spite of different stylistic decisions throughout, can be pictured as simmering and unhinged. “Couch Slut Lewis,” “Laughing and Crying,” and “Wilkinson’s Sword” plod carefully and deliberately with an Oxbow-esque lounging pace through a noisy backdrop with memorable guitar licks throughout erupting into dissonant squawks, while Osztrosits’ shrieks describe rape and self-harm with raw and unflinching detail. The heart on their sleeves were traded for weed on 4/20, so any compassion is left in a haze of shock and smoke. Explosions of noise envelope tracks like “Ode to Jimbo” and “Energy Crystals for Healing” in a wave somehow larger than the already mammoth riffs dominating, while devastating roars of guests Zach Ezrin of Imperial Triumphant and Doug Moore of Pyrrhon add a distinct edge to “Couch Slut Lewis” and “Downhill Racer.” Like any good noise rock, there is a constant curtain of sound draped across Couch Slut’s sound, weaponized to a vicious and unhinged degree.

While the album at large maintains that trademark insanity, there are three instances in particular that challenge the listener. “Presidential Welcome” is a grimy jazz interlude straight outta Vile Luxury, starkly decadent after the climactic and filthy predecessor. This predecessor, “The Donkey,” features Osztrosits’ spoken word with dissonant squawks and a tapestry of feedback, lyrics describing a particular nightmare in which a couple make a stop-motion horror film, and the guy nearly saws off his arm to get enough blood for their film – the antics are described with unnerving conversational casualness. Meanwhile, closer “The Weaversville Home for Boys” utilizes spoken word atop pulsing beats and warbling squeals, describing an urban legend of three boys massacring the entire population of their school and vanishing, as our drugged narrator stumbles upon them laughing at the sky. It’s all unnerving.

In its themes and mood, You Could Do it Tonight can summed up by the lyrics in “Downhill Racer:” “My walls build moisture, enough to drown. I watch the water where he went down. My leg’s infected from all these scratches.” Couch Slut has no clear motive aside from absolute grime and maximum discomfort. While horror and mutilation are common themes throughout metal- and noise rock-adjacent lyrics, there’s an obscene absurdity that collides with jarring normality through these stories: as if rape, self-harm, and murder were all just everyday facets of urban life. You can trust no one. Interpreting Couch Slut and You Could Do It Tonight is a complex feat – it’s not an easy album, hardly an enjoyable one. But it is an impressively uncomfortable drug-induced listen full of captivating storytelling through effective spoken word and a vocal performance from hell, stinging instrumentals, and oily grime – like all good noise rock steeped in misery and sarcasm.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 4¹ Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Brutal Panda Records
Websites: couchslut.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/couchslut | instagram.com/couch.slut
Releases Worldwide: April 19th, 2024

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