by Leila Rodriguez (@leilajjade)
The Live at Value Sound Studios album by The Submissives is an honest, versatile, chamber of preternatural affairs. Full of satirical, distorted sounds, the band are reminiscent of 60s kink-style, psychedelic-fueled rock and riot-y Mommy Long Legs qualities. The Submissives, led by Deb Edison, paired these punky genres with an almost ballade-like lullaby element from twee-pop. Flooded with complete unadulterated expression, they paint in all sorts of directions, creating haunting tracks that carry both a freshly birthed naïvety and an ancient heartbreak.
The band recorded Live At Value Sound Studios in Spring 2017 and in the years leading up to its 2024 release, it has weathered with this enchanting hypnosis instead of having grown mold with the tear of aged trends. Listeners are immediately bombarded with spews of deadpan voices, nonlinear violin outbursts, and just as quickly, the clamor of their spontaneity stirs in a warmed nest of collaboration. The monotonic whistle of their voices creates a force that stretches around the conclave of an ear, slowly seeping into the brain some sort of dominating mesmerism. Each song is able to peel back facades and gaze further and further down kaleidoscopic spirals towards destinations that don’t exist. They open up Pandora’s box with a serpentine precision.
The stories they share with us are ill with lovesickness. They talk about their friend Betty, whose head is full of spaghetti, they pray for the protection of their hearts, and they sing about desire. However, sweet tales of love become long, tormenting voyages as they are paired with the crescendoing chaos of The Submissives’ creativity. The beginning of “You On My Mind” is collected with distinct rhythms and lyrics but as the song continues, the facade of control unravels by the trumpet and violin getting into this harmonious argument full of defeat and wails that come to swallow the voices and the schemed lyrics of the song. It ends with “I submit to the boy, I submit to the man, and with it my joy, I put in his hand. Anything’s better than being apart of whose, whose, please don’t break my heart.” Less about love and romance than it is about a holistic human experience of odyssic traversals, the entire album explores different legs and directions of life so that all of us get to be opened up and you are able to live in this liminal threshold between the self and between a collective feeling outside of the self.
Every time the music eats itself into hive-like swarms of buzzed madness, the individual eeriness of each instrument contributes to a gentle caress where a weird stillness exists. You’re edged on, your emotion in the fingertips of those commanding the music, and yet you willingly succumb to the uncomfortable curls of the sound. The Submissives send us down pendulums that won’t stop rocking, gravitationally pulling us to non-existent stops. We are thrown into riots of unfiltered whimsy, of seductive psychosis, and yet, Live At Value Sound Studios tenderly wraps us in blankets of lulling softness.