Summer Cannibals - Full of It

Pitchfork 72

For their third album, Portland's Summer Cannibals signed to the legendary local label Kill Rock Stars. KRS president Portia Sabin has said that the band “take us back to our roots,” and in songwriter/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux, the four-piece have an insurrectionist frontwoman worthy of the label's well-populated hall of fame. But on Full of It, Summer Cannibals toughen up their assault and hark back to the heavy scene that the Pacific Northwest punks killed off in the late 1980s. Their wailing riff-o-rama, double-tracked guitars, and sharp arpeggios soundtrack Boudreaux's frustrations with a dead-end relationship, wielding (and subverting) machismo rock tropes against a domineering, unavailable guy.

On paper, a lot of Boudreaux's lyrics can seem strangely submissive, pleading for validation and putting her faith in a union that she knows is doomed. “You turn a blind eye to my every appeal,” she sings on “I Wanna Believe.” “You make me feel like nothing matters but I still see your face/It makes me weak.” Her sneering delivery, though, is a self-aware send-up of this piteous-yet-sometimes-inevitable state, and the frustration that can accompany succumbing to such basic romance woes. She puts her anguish into wider context on the lumbering, cathartic closer “Simple Life,” questioning whether it's enough to want a “simple love and a simple home.” It's reminiscent of White Lung, whose recent fourth album Paradise sounds like a hairier sibling to Full of It, and also finds Mish Way reconciling her punk background with her conventional desires.

The 11 songs on Full of It barely break the three-minute mark, and wed incendiary fretwork to bottom-end that rolls like a boulder down a marble run. They can do stadium ragers (“Go Home”), suspenseful Sonic Youth-indebted menace (“Just a Little Bit”), sludgy girl-groupisms (“Say My Name”), euphoria (“The Lover”), and on “Not Enough,” the brittle conversation between Boudreaux and Marc Swart's guitars evokes early Sleater-Kinney. Summer Cannibals balance the abjection of their lyrics by playing like they're auditioning to ride the flame-belching rig in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Despite the ambiguity of some of her lyrics, Boudreaux's ire is rarely in dispute across these songs thanks to her bile-drenched delivery, though the moments where she makes it explicit are particularly good. “Talk Over Me” is full of coolly insolent, stinging riffs that accompany Boudreaux telling some paternalistic ass where to get off: “I'm not gonna let you talk over me one more time, and I'm not gonna wait for someone else to say that I'm right.” That self-assurance is why Full of It works: Boudreaux can sing from a position of weakness thanks to Summer Cannibals' palpable confidence. On the title track, which kicks back at the music press, she makes perfectly clear that her sense of self doesn't hinge on anyone else's approval: “Tell me my worth, I'll tell you my pitch,” Boudreaux drawls, before scoffing: “Another lie, yeah, another unreachable itch.” Full of It may not sound like classic Kill Rock Stars fare, but in these complex negotiations of power—both emotional and musical—they both fit right in and offer a smart update to their history.