Chastity Belt - I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone

The Quietus

Chastity Belt are amazingly good at exploring the endless ways in which we are trapped: in time, space, gender, social circles. It starts as a teenage thing but it expands (as you know) into adulthood; over the course of three albums, they’ve peered further into the ways we are stuck, hopeless. They do it, though, with style and soft grace, with pealing guitar and lurching bass and lyrics which are at once funny and sad, bleak and friendly.

Julia Shapiro, Gretchen Grimm, Annie Truscott and Lydia Lund met a few years ago at college in Walla Walla and are now based in San Francisco. They are a tight gang, women who would stop and put an arm around you if they saw you messed up late at night, vomming in a gutter (yes, you can tell this from their songs). Their albums are getting tighter and warmer too. It is as if they have realised that there are two options - run away or dig dig dig in deeper. And when they dig in, they come up with some really good songs.

They are trapped as millennials, skint and self-aware and tedious: “I wanna do something cool and I wanna get paid” (‘Something Else’). They are trapped in habits: “but I wanna be in the scene, and there's comfort in routine”(‘Complain’). They are trapped in social media habits “if I look at my phone again I'll just die” (What the Hell). Most frequently, they are trapped in that tawdry and otherworldly bit at the end of a messy night: “Fucked up, anxious, full of fear, how do I get out of here?” (This Time of Night). The disappointing gap between youth and adulthood starts to look like the gap between birth and dying.

On ‘Complain’, they do sing about what it’d be like to get out, to give up on life, instead of digging in: “Do you ever dream of what it's like to give up?” But it’s funny as well as sad, and the ace bassline with Shapiro’s resigned voice makes the nightmarish hook - “I’m not okay, I’m not okay” - feel soft and dreamy, and the next line, “I want to complain,” somehow makes it funny.

On ‘Different Now’, the lyrics are sardonic fortune cookies - “You'll find in time all the answers that you seek have been sitting there waiting to be seen” - as if we are kept here, in limbo, by the promise of a good life (‘living our best life’) just beyond reach. And when it gets too much they use boredom as anaesthetic, plunging further into boozy woozy vulnerable posturing. It’s like Emily Rapp wrote: “My life is over. My life is just beginning. I feel like a two thousand year old teenager.”

There is joy here, beyond the pleasure of wallowing so elegantly and tunefully in ennui. There’s a jangly whiff of Madchester on ‘Stuck’, and ‘Used To Spend So Much Time Alone’ soars, just a little bit, as Shapiro sings, with laconic reserve: “My doubts are all gone and I'm having a pretty good time.” And there is a powerful sense of a band playing together and touring together and getting bored and scared and stoned and happy together. On final track, ‘5am’, the whole band seems to galvanise, get lighter; everything is still not okay, but the sun is definitely coming up. There’s a rallying, there’s feedback then a stumble and a siren, a quiet emergency.

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What they would have to concede, though, is that at one point in time, they might have wanted you to believe that. Their social media activity has always seen them keeping their collective firmly in cheek, and their lyrics in the early days were often throwaway - not least on their debut album, No Regerts, which had them playfully pulling apart the minutiae of life at and after university. They poked plenty of fun at themselves, too, both on and off record, but you always felt that they had the seeds of something special - not least a vice-like grasp of melody, and an incisive lyricist in vocalist Julia Shapiro.

Amongst those in agreement on those points were Hardly Art, the offshoot of Sub Pop that, as far as this writer can tell, was founded at the point at which the legendary Seattle label finally said, “right, we’re officially too good at signing new bands: we’ll have to hive some of the younger ones off elsewhere”. That worked for Chastity Belt just fine; Time to Go Home, their second record, from 2015, was No Regerts all grown up. More thoughtful and profound subject matter was ushered in alongside a healthy dash of their well-established good humour, with the opener, ‘Drone’, a call to arms against mansplaining.

I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone by Chastity Belt

The overall sound was richer, too; Shapiro’s guitar lines were beginning to interlock cleverly with Lydia Lund’s, and there was a palpable tension to the album as a whole that spoke to the insecurity lurking beneath the impish front the four-piece were putting up. After all, for the longest time, they liked to say that the whole affair wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, less because they were genuinely that carefree and more because such flippancy provided a useful shield with which to deflect negative write-ups.

By the time it came to the task of following up Time to Go Home, there were far more eyes trained on Chastity Belt than ever before, which is what favourable press attention, extensive touring and support slots to the likes of Death Cab for Cutie will do for you. The band that had previously baulked at even the most incidental instances of pressure now had quite a bit of it concentrated upon them. Everything we knew about them previously suggested that they wouldn’t react especially well to it. Instead, they decamped to Portland, Oregon, enlisted Wire’s Matthew Simms on production duties, and turned out what will likely go down as their masterpiece.

On the surface, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone sounds like a band more at ease with themselves than ever; just taken at face value, some of these tracks sound languid and woozy where so much of Time to Go Home was wound tight. In the end, that assumption is true; Chastity Belt couldn’t have made an album like this unless they were far more confident in their own abilities than they so often lead us to believe - but that’s not to say that this isn’t a deeply emotional album. The difference is just that those emotions are both better balanced and less veiled.

Opener ‘Different Now’ acknowledges anxiety over growing older, but by the chant-along final chorus, it sounds positively celebratory. Self-deprecation’s a theme on that one, too, and it’s hardly a surprise that it comes up frequently on I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone. “I wonder what it feels like not to care?” is a striking line from ‘It’s Obvious’. ‘Complain’, meanwhile, is scored through with a disillusionment that often borders on despair, and the softly devastating ‘Something Else’ tackles similar ideas, with all the promise that post-collegiate life seems to hold initially having dissipated into directionlessness. There’s little ideas that are threaded through the songs that reinforce that - late nights and a lack of routine are consistently presented as having lost their sheen, especially on stormy closer ‘5am’. I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone frequently feels like a counterpoint to No Regerts in that respect.

That’s true of the way it sounds, too; Simms mixed Time to Go Home, but the band weren’t in a financial position to secure his services on the production front back then. The shift between their first two releases and this one is nuanced, but it’s there; they’ve started to overdub the guitars more readily, but not in a way that’s at all gung-ho. There’s also a move away from the spikiness of old, one that’s given way to undulating guitar lines, lilting bass playing from Annie Truscott and a general sense that the group’s writing has become more measured, more assured. When the punkier Chastity Belt of old do emerge, as on ‘This Time of Night’ and ‘5am’, their Washington heritage is palpable; that side of the album plays like a less hectic version of Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock.

The beauty of this record is not just that it so consistently refers to the idea that’s implicit in the title, but that you know that it’s coming from a really honest place, especially where Shapiro is concerned. In this band, she’s not just found a career and a creative outlet; the most invaluable thing it’s given her is camaraderie, the sort that you can’t manufacture and that only really offers itself up as the product of countless hours spent with the same three people in the backs of vans, on strange couches in strange towns, and onstage in front of people you might not know, but that know you and love the art you make. That one-for-all, all-for-one attitude is obviously reflected in the occasional delegation of songwriting duties, too; Lund and drummer Gretchen Grimm take individual songwriting credits across the course of the album, with three tracks between them.

I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is pretty in its sonic gloominess and witty in the way that it wears its anxieties on its sleeve, but what makes it special is the way that all of that is grounded by the sturdiest of anchors - the quiet optimism that friendship inspires. The mask that Chastity Belt wore for so long has slipped. They’re not just mucking around, and this isn’t all meant to be a bit of a laugh. On this form, they’re the brightest and best of the current indie rock crop.

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Emo might be a safe haven for the sad kids, but it doesn’t often reflect the day-to-day drudgery of mind-crushing depression, which sounds less like screaming and more like the final whimper you emit before finally becoming part of the floor. Leave that to shoegaze or post-punk, or to the tuneful mark between the two that Seattle rock band Chastity Belt hits on their third album.

Though it’s buffered with slices of relative optimism—opener “Different Now” lays out a few answers to what band wrestles with for the rest of the album—I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone curls into dark corners, exploring the depths of desperation and self-loathing that Chastity Belt only hinted at on their last two albums. Instead of belting out smirking shoutalongs like “Cool Slut” (about the joys of sleeping around) or “Pussy Weed Beer” (self-explanatory), lead singer Julia Shapiro enters a headspace with new gravity, where the word “pussy” isn’t funny anymore and sleeping with someone—or otherwise—is out of the question. The album sheds Chastity Belt’s former tongue-in-cheek bubbliness for the kind of world-weariness that only sets in with time and only time can ease.

“Fucked up, anxious, full of fear/How did I get here?” Shapiro hollers on “This Time of Night,” playing her own antagonist in a song about curling up in bed and shutting out the world: “Pull the sheets over my eyes.” It’s the most aggressive Chastity Belt has ever sounded, thanks to the full-bodied attack Gretchen Grimm hammers out on drums during the verses. While that song still offers the guitar curlicues that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Real Estate album, “Stuck” is smeared with Slowdive reverb, “Something Else” borrows its octave-jumping trebles from Joy Division, and the lovesick rumble “It’s Obvious” could have been snatched from the B-sides to Hum’s 1995 LP You’d Prefer an Astronaut.

The varied taxonomy of the band gels together as they relay the psychological slog of trying really hard to just be OK. Rhythm guitars fall like thick curtains behind the meandering leads, while Grimm and bassist Annie Truscott weight each song down like a lead apron. Their playing grounds Shapiro’s thorny subject matter, which against lighter dressing might come off flippant or mean. Instead, her sarcasm sounds like the final weapon she’s got left in her arsenal against the totalizing blankness of twentysomething ennui.

There’s a word Shapiro keeps using while muscling her way through the clouds over her head. “I just fall on my face when I’m trying to have fun/Do you ever dream about what it’s like to give up?” she sings on “Complain.” “Dream” isn’t the first word most lyricists would use on the lead-in to “give up,” but Shapiro neutralizes its positive connotations over and over again. On “Caught in a Lie,” she’s “caught in someone else’s dream,” a prison of expectation where she tries to play a role someone else has thought up for her. "Is this what you want?/Is this who you want me to be?”

Maybe it’s in tribute to depression’s cyclical nature that Alone’s opener also plays like it’s conclusion. Instead of sounding haggard and beleaguered, Shapiro sings from a place of calm on “Different Now.” It’s as if she’s figured out how to save herself from her worst moments and wrote the song as an instruction manual. “Take away your pride and take away your grief/And you'll finally be right where you need to be,” she advises. But it’s only track one, the eye of the storm, and before long, the clouds roll right back in.