Chastity Belt are a band whose relative cult status seems unfair but unsurprising. Their blend of slacker rock and dream pop would be right at home on some of the bigger festival stages, but there is a restraint and subtlety to their approach which perhaps explains why they haven’t broken through more widely. A new album from them is always a cause for celebration, though, and Live Laugh Love is no exception.
Don’t be put off by the title – this isn’t a collection of blandly generic self-help mantras masquerading as songs or a gratingly twee listen. Although the music is dreamlike and beautiful throughout, the songs aren’t overly optimistic in their outlook. Indeed, at times they feel like voices reaching for hope and finding it in short supply. The gentleness of the music – softly strummed rhythm guitars, flange-assisted leads and fluid bass lines – hides the darker mood. When you listen carefully to what vocalist Julia Shapiro is actually singing about, the disconnect between the hard edge of the lyrics and the softness of the music makes this mood all the more arresting.
If “live, laugh, love” is an absurdly reductive phrase, a self-evidently ludicrous panacea to the challenges of life, then the songs on this record sketch out the difficulties of overcoming those challenges. The sense one gets as a listener is not “things will be ok”; alienation and a lack of control are the dual thematic threads running through the middle of the album. The voices we meet repeatedly air their sense that things have got away from them. On ‘Kool Aid’, Shapiro sings “It’s not what I want” on the chorus, whilst on ‘Blue’ she declares herself to be “searching for meaning”, asking a series of questions that go unanswered.
Even the seemingly more optimistic tracks aren’t as straightforward as they initially seem. Although they initially seem to possess the confidence and answers lacking elsewhere, there is a lack of conviction in the claims they stake, as though Shapiro is trying to convince themselves as much as the listener and failing in this endeavour. On repeat listens, the songs’ hidden truths eventually show themselves, revealing the messier realities of life. On ‘It’s Cool’, we are initially told that “living’s worth some pain”, but this belief slowly unravels as the song progresses, and the outro coda of “It’s cool” becomes less convincing each time it’s repeated.
Throughout, the songs’ protagonists appear to be confronting themselves, but only up to a point. They are consistently able to pinpoint their own flaws or the ways in which elements of their lives have gone wrong, but unable to act on these observations or challenge themselves to be better. The restraint of the music – even when the distortion kicks in, it is controlled rather than cathartic – heightens this sense of them pulling punches, unable or unwilling to change things. Life is instead a sort of waking dream in which the protagonists are carried powerlessly along by the tide.
Though the band’s subtlety and restraint mean that the songs can seem a little tasteful and withdrawn on first listen, repeat listens tell a different story. What initially seems like reserve and studied cool reveals itself to be a different kind of detachment, the alienation and ennui that forms the lyrical nexus of the record. It underscores the sense of being overwhelmed by life, of feeling like spectators rather than participants in their own life. The record is imbued with a hazy, narcotised atmosphere. ‘Clumsy’, with its strummed acoustic guitar, splashy drums and minor key sensibility recalls the Nirvana MTV Unplugged sound, and the instruments constantly feel as though they are on the verge of falling out of tune. ‘I-90 Bridge’, meanwhile, accompanies its vivid lyrical snapshots with shimmering guitar and a hypnotic driving bass line that renders those snapshots as hazy, cinematic memories. The music is both beautiful and unnerving, swaddling the listener with a delicate but expansive wall of sound that also manages to convey the sense of being off-kilter in a way you can’t quite put your finger on.
This is an ethereal, dreamlike record whose images and emotions are buried beneath a thick blanket of woozy, effects-laden instrumentation, mimicking how those memories and emotions are not fully accessible to protagonists who share them on the album’s songs. The resulting listen is captivating, haunting and uncomfortable, as though you are intruding on someone’s therapy sessions but can’t tear yourself away from listening in. It is well worth your time.
Words by Will Collins
Picky Bastards 
Leave a comment