“To be female,” singer and guitarist Marisa Dabice not too long ago stated, talking traditionally and contemporaneously, “is profane.” If Dabice and her bandmates celebrated that profanity over a decade in the past after they christened their band Model Pussy, their new album, I Were given Heaven, is a bacchanal. It’s a mouthy, messy, confident file that seeks out conventions essentially to taunt them—style and social conventions, positive, but in addition the normal knowledge that claims the subtle flower of a girl’s want wilts if got rid of from its man-made greenhouse. Like Hollow’s Are living Thru This, in all probability its closest antecedent, it revels in its maximum uncomfortable contradictions. It displays its ugliest face, and it at all times comes out on most sensible. It’s laborious to believe an indie-rock file higher fitted to the instant.
There’s not anything on I Were given Heaven just like the slick romantic catharsis of “Under the influence of alcohol II,” the instant-classic unmarried from the band’s 2019 album Persistence. “I nonetheless love you, you silly fuck,” Dabice sings to cap the primary verse. That line changed into one thing just like the band’s calling card, whether or not wittingly or no longer, the type of punchline you spend a complete live performance ready to scream again. It’s inclined, nearly affectionate, however its energy is determined by the protagonist’s feeling beholden to any person else in opposition to her needs, if no longer her will. The silly “fucks” on I Were given Heaven, in the meantime, come from the act of fucking itself, skilled gleefully by way of other people prepared to possibility their independence and self-sufficiency if it way getting theirs. When Dabice sings, “Rewind your self, get me off, make me really feel so elite,” it’s principally inconceivable to believe her ever making a song “Under the influence of alcohol II” once more.
I Were given Heaven is at its highest when Model Pussy chortle their well past feeling conflicted. Within the name observe, Dabice is a canine panting on the knee of a stranger, similarly in a position to chew or hump relying on how issues pass. By the point the refrain comes round, even though, she’s nearly cooing. “Oh, I’m an angel,” she sings, “I used to be despatched right here to convey you corporate.” It’s no longer a negation of the fable—within the very subsequent verse, she wonders aloud what it might be like if “Jesus himself ate my fucking take hold of,” her voice just about breaking right into a moan—however an acknowledgment that even a girl enjoying the dominant hornball function nonetheless has to navigate the boys who assume the entire thing is their reward.
