Sextile : yes, please
Did anyone ask for an electroclash revival? Was it ever gone so long that it required one? I have my own answers to these questions, but Sextile provide theirs in the title of their fourth studio LP: yes, please. The Los Angeles trio sound fully divorced from the shoegaze-swirled garage rock that founding members Brady Keehn and Melissa Scaduto first brought to market. Sextile cede almost all of their analog guitar legacy to electronics, and write lyrics suggesting the kind of dialogue screamed by would-be suitors over the mix at bars next to dance floors.
yes, please. comes loaded with stuff you find in modern electronic body music, reinforcing just how much that genre can bleed over into more common clubland EDM. Descending keyboard lines and occasional breakneck speed made cult classics for KMFDM in industrial and The Prodigy in big beat, and I want that for Sextile songs like “Push Ups.” Yet there’s a simplicity to this band’s attempts at sonic and thematic sleaze obstructing their path to success.
The four-on-the-floor instrumentals are largely competent and not much more, but It’s really the lyrics and their delivery that tamp down expectations for this album. Sextile turn almost everything on yes, please. into dissonant diss tracks that aren’t written or chanted (or yelled, or grumbled) in nearly as acerbic a manner as the band likely intended. References to Trent Reznor and Kurt Cobain, mainstream avatars of irony and rebellion for decades, feel neither ironic nor rebellious. The band’s common-sense politics come across as simplistic in “Resist” and tacked on as an afterthought at the end of “Women Respond to Bass.”
For all of the band’s thematic piss and vinegar, some of the best songwriting on yes, please. comes in tracks that run a little slower. “Soggy Newports” is the album’s dramatic finale, recounting Scaduto’s experiences in a New York nursing home recovering from an accident, and “99 Bongos” celebrates a partying lifestyle as it locks into a dancepunk groove The Juan Maclean might have delivered. Songs like “Kids,” meanwhile, manage to match the trio’s penchant for aggressive arrangements with a sung message that doesn’t feel forced. Latter bits of musicianship like this give me continued hope for Sextile’s post-post-punk future.
Label: Sacred Bones
Year: 2025
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