Album Review: Chastity Belt, Live Laugh Love

Live Laugh Love is a full-blooded cousin to Chastity Belt’s eponymously titled last album. Both were recorded with engineer Samur Khouja in LA, and thematically, both focus on the resolve necessary to face down the perpetual bullshit life throws up.

Chastity Belt have always appeared to be an unruffled bunch, in an über-cool, Nico-mashed-with-Lemonheads manner, but is this the Washington quartet at their most mellow – and, perhaps, debonair? The album artwork – a deliriously merry, flailing, inflatable tube man who resembles a giant carrot – would appear to indicate so.

A decade on from their iconoclastic debut, which included raucous belters ‘(Giant) Vagina’ and ‘Pussy Weed Beer’, lead singer Julia Shapiro continues to cast her caustic, comic eye over shitty terrain. But hey, when you sound this good, why not pucker up and revel in the manure?

‘Kool-Aid’ – bassist Annie Truscott’s debut as lead vocalist – is a compelling drone exercise, while Gretchen Grimm’s martial drumbeat on ‘Chemtrails’ is equally irresistible. Elsewhere, Lydia Lund’s dagger guitar wonderfully pierces the balloon of ‘Tethered’, while the depiction of teenage nihilism on ‘I-90 Bridge’ is achingly beautiful.

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