Photo credit: PJ Moody
Sex Scenes delight in living down to their name. The Milwaukee punk quartet specializes in trashy, dirty punk delivered with the brevity of The Germs, the furor of Jesus Lizard, and the contemptuous, satirical bite of Pissed Jeans. “We just wanted to do something that we hadn’t done before in any of our other bands, just be obnoxious and gross,” says bassist Connor LaMue.
Despite their feral delivery and subversive edge, though, there’s a vulnerable center at the core of Sex Scenes' songs. For singer Zach Otto especially, the band's music serves as a kind of a therapeutic release. Recorded with Shane Hochstetler at Howl Street Studios, the songs on the group's raucous new 15-minute album h find him wrestling with his worst impulses, at war with his own gnarly id.
“Usually my lyrics are just born from personal traumas,” Otto says. “I used to just not be the best person. And then late last year I had this… well, I don’t want to call it a rock-bottom moment, but it was a moment where I was like, ‘OK, I gotta clean myself up.’ So a lot of the songs are self-deprecating, me taking a look in the mirror.”
The result is a series of sharp, unsympathetic snap shots of awfulness and overindulgence. “Give me the keys to the liquor cabinet!” Otto howls on “Viewfinder.” “I wanna be a monster, and I’m under your bed!” he growls lecherously on “Jackal.” Even when he writes outside himself, he sticks to the theme. On “Credit Score” he sings as the worst downtown worker bro you’ve ever stood behind in line at a Colectivo: “You better get out of my way, because I’m a business man!”
Entertaining as these songs are, they’re very much the sound of a man working through some shit—or, in the case of the magnificently spiteful closer “Sorry This Affects You,” where drummer Chelsea Hays takes the lead for a track, singing lyrics pieced together from a text message conversation, a woman working through some shit. It's not just angry music. It's constructive music.
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“It’s a very cathartic, therapeutic experience to even practice with Sex Scenes,” Otto says. “It’s like a cleansing thing, and the people in the band really have helped me be a better person.”
As for h’s slapdash title, LaMue says that it’s mostly a lark, a display of indifference. “It just doesn’t matter,” LaMue says. “And also the sign language letter for ‘H’ is suggestive, so it kind of works.”
The Shepherd Express is excited to stream h ahead of the band’s album release show Saturday, May 26 at Cactus Club with The Spits, Gallery Night and Brain Bats. You can stream it below, and buy it through the band's Bandcamp page.
