When I’d first heard that Marian Call was doing a garage band album with foul language, at some point I thought about Kaywinnet Lee Frye and Simon Tam discussing the appropriate times to swear. Regardless of what you do or do not know about Call personally, her singing persona doesn’t necessarily readily suggest anything other than the Simon end of that conversation.
Of course, being television, we not much later do see Simon swear. (Who could blame him, given the circumstances.)
When I posted about the first single dropping earlier this month, I’d said that it gave me “complicated feelings of expectations both met and confounded” that at the time I couldn’t explain. I probably could have; it’s mostly that somehow I’d imagined Call roughing up her voice more than she does here. That’s not a failing of the single, or of the album; it’s simply a mismatch of trying in advance to imagine the album in my head.
At any rate, the five-song EP itself—Swears!—drops today, and the only real thing I will say about it now is that “Glacier Bones” is brutal and while I always expect certain Call numbers to break me I fully did not at all expect to be broken by a garage band.
Fuck you, too, Nature.