by Matt Watton (@brotinus)
Imagine being on a rollercoaster about to plunge from its highest peak, and they announce the breaks are out – then you drop: the inevitable fear is tempered, ironically, by an uncontrollable exhilaration. Your heart races at each breakneck turn, the uncertainty and intensity at once dismaying and vitalizing. That’s what it’s like to listen to Wet Dip. The Austin-based trio make bilingual no-wave that is unsettlingly anxious but also life-affirming and necessary. Their debut album, Smell of Money, is pervaded by pounding riffs, staticky, screeching guitars, and entrancing vocals. The music is challenging and rewarding and extremely singular in the current landscape.
Recorded with Sweeping Promises’ Caufield Schnug, this music has more in common with original 80s no-wave than its modern-day post-punk scions: Wet Dip put forward dissonant, caustic songs only occasionally, even accidentally, ending up with some danceable, bass-driven funky moments. Tunes like “Rollercoaster,” “Black Friday,” and “Finale” are abrasive, with ever-shifting tempos and unpredictable interjections and explosions of guitar and cymbals. Guitarist Daniel Doyle struggles to tame his unbroken guitar, just barely winning the fight, while drummer Erica Rodriguez displays the right kind of amateurism, slightly behind the beat, holding the band together with scotch tape – but punching above her paygrade. Bassist and vocalist Sylvia Rodriguez embodies the band’s unpredictability, as she code switches between English and Spanish, haunting whispers and vein-popping screams.
These tracks linger with you as much for the music as for the heavy lyrics. Some songs explore themes of our modern capitalist hellscape (“Killing Floor” answers the album title’s question: what’s the smell of money? “SMELLS LIKE SHIT!!”). Others center on specifically female pain, angst, and anger at exploitation and sexual abuse (“Black Friday,” “Emperor”). On “Finale” Rodriguez announces she can only express herself in the “idioma de mi madre” (her mother’s tongue), and on “Train Wreck” (as best I can understand with my high-school level Spanish), she commands her enemies to look her in the eye (“mira me”) and keep their greedy stomach hands (“manos del estomago”) off of her.
As a male and as a gringo, there’s necessarily things I can’t understand (both words and subtexts), but the energy and tenor of the music fills in the gaps with its overwhelming and unrelenting force, its resistance to simple tonal centers or recognizable song structures, and its abrupt stops and crescendos. The thesis of the band is perhaps best summed up by two choice covers – a stripped down version of the Pixies’ “Silver,” which wrings the eerie, feminine energy out of the original; and a cover of Mexican pop royalty Gloria Trevi’s song “Pelo Suelto” – a tune about being oneself no matter what others think is transformed into a piercing and unsettling assertion of Wet Dip’s own musical independence and singularity. Truly a powerful and timely record.