Review written by Bryan "Jonesy" Jones
If a switchblade could sing, it would sound like Masani Negloria, bassist and vocalist for Austin’s Pussy Gillette. Negloria stabs through lyrics like “I gotta hole in my new kicks/I gotta job, and I’m sick of it” from the track “So Fucked” on their second album, Permanent Trash.
Negloria’s style is as distinctive as her voice: leather, leopard print, spikes, a watermelon tattooed on her left bicep, and an Afro so amazing there’s an entire article devoted to it in Black Beauty Magazine. On occasion, she will don a vampire cape.
She’s a punk icon already -- standing at the mic shouting lyrics from “Slick One,” “Slick one can’t play me, I’m no sucka,” and fingering her fuzzy bass lines. The tracks on this album come together to embody the punk ethos that anyone can do it while standing out amongst their contemporaries as a singular talent that one is lucky to happen upon once in a decade. The album sounds like they recorded each song exactly in the moment that they were composed, seamlessly addressing everything from the mundane to the profane.
It’s hard to believe this R-rated, punk, power trio came together only a few years ago. According to Sophia Swengel of Transmissions from the Battlefield, Negoria didn’t pick up a bass until her 30s. She might be singing about the small, south Texas town of Beeville, where she was born, on the track “Left my Town.” It’s not clear when Negloria left that town for Austin, but eventually, she paired up on a whim with guitarist Nathan Calhoun, a “scene veteran” of the psychedelic, noise rock outfits We Are The Asteroid and Gibby Haynes & His Problems. Calhoun and drummer Brent Prager met in the 90s when both were playing in various bands in the scene.
Given that the excellent Nathan Calhoun is on guitar, one might assume that Pussy Gillette runs on the stoner/acid punk side of things: something like Butthole Surfers might be the expectation. But rather than stoner grooves, Calhoun hits driving, 8th note, power chords on the rhythm sections, and chokes the hell out of his guitar on the leads. He’s a master of the bend, expertly placing them against the grain of the lines growling out of Negloria’s Peavey amp, and spiking them ever-so-slightly with the occasional pinch harmonic. Combined with Prager pounding the hell out of the Haymans, Pussy Gillette lands somewhere between a punk throwback and something out of the post-apocalyptic future, making them timeless.
The look of a VHS with tracking issues has come to define their videos is back once aging for “Permanent Trash.” I like to think of finding stacks of these VHS tapes in an abandoned storage unit somewhere in the outskirts of Austin. You push aside hip-height weeds, yellowed by drought, and enter this cramped storage unit full of ancient media, discarded clothes, and assorted home appliances. Eventually, you find this box of types with titles like “The Flesh,” “Germs,” and “Too Much to Handle” scrawled in red magic marker on their labels. It could be home videos. It could be homegrown porn. Not knowing what you’re going to get, you pop it into the VCR/TV combo you found on top of a dresser and under a box of bicycle parts. You're either going to be disturbed on some visceral level you didn’t know existed or disappointed. The DIY music videos you discover are far from disappointing, and the threat of possibly being disturbed propels you through each one.
It's hard to tell at first what era the video for “Permanent Trash” is set in. Taking place in a mall, it calls back to the glory days of mall culture, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no 80s/90s shopping center. This is a mall whose faint heartbeat slowly beeps on life support as it's few shoppers search Amazon for better deals on the junk they browse on its shelves. You were expecting to find some relic in that box of tapes, but it dawns on you that these videos are unbelievably current.
I have to say that I miss the explorations of darker themes and the overt political awareness from the last effort, simply titled Pussy Gillette. Album. There, you’ll find the track “Mala Noche,” which denounces Christ. On Permanent Trash we get “Que Gacho,” which is Spanish slang for “messed up.” But, maybe my Spanish just isn’t good enough to catch everything Negloria is tossing at me. I was looking for a track like “Walking Crime,” which had the line “You see me as a walking crime/ But, you’re just a pig to me.” I don’t think there is one, but maybe her entendres are too subtle for me in her English language songs.
Don’t get me wrong, this album -- despite the band’s initials -- is pretty far from PG. You get plenty of entendres and some don’t stop at just double. There’s lots of overt language, like the request to “Kiss me on my permanent gash” from the title track and the ode to the feel of smooth leather seats under her butt cheeks on “Hot Wire.”