Review by Cecilia Pattison-Levi
Melbourne band Wet Kiss are about to release their second album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse. It is an album of ten songs that embraces the complex processes of change, chaos and beauty within life. There is a rawness to the production as if the album was recorded mostly live – and the listener will instantly get that sonic feel of a Wet Kiss gig.
Wet Kiss (Brenna O, Aldo Thomas, Daniel Ward, Ben Sendy-Smithers and Ruby Stoney) invites the listener to step into their world. A world where drama, pop, musical cabaret, and enigmatic proto-punk collide with the nonchalant sleaze of night clubs. It’s a complex sonic soundscape. The album opens with the song ‘The Gay Band’ with its piano melody underpinning the rock song that it will become. It is a strong song of intent about “the body and its link to the material world” and its melodramatic appeal to “sex and death drives”.
The next song is the first single ‘Isn’t Music Wonderful’ and the optimistic title delivers a big glam rock urgency with 1970’s inspired sounds. The song celebrates the beauty of music while revealing the challenges of making a living in the music industry plain. With a whistle and a sample from an old film ‘Skirt’ commences. The chugging guitar riff underpins the messiness of a gigging band and at the same time celebrates performance and the vulnerabilities it brings. The band has to put up with crowds that get wasted, while the singer in the band doesn’t drink when working and hates the leering looks. The squeal of guitar feedback and a big rock guitar leads in ‘Pink Shadow’ about clubbing and musical adventures in Berlin. The drums are fabulous on this track.
Driving guitars herald ‘Metal Silhouette’ and it has a real 1970’s punk drive with a great guitar solo. Short but so punk! Then, the song ‘Chick From Nowhere’ follows and it explores stumbling out of bars at dawn, capturing the bittersweet highs and lows of fleeting connections with another piano led melody and lovely muted electric guitar. ‘Gender Affirmation Clinic’ follows which is a distorted guitar ballad that has thunderous drums come into the song to set the mood and tone of the lyricism that touches on waiting at the gender clinic for hormone therapy while overseas and the emotional toll it takes.
A lovely plucked guitar softly brings in the song ‘Small Clubs’ and it concerns lyrics about resetting oneself and living free with liberty and dignity. ‘Babe’ follows and it is a pop song, with a soaring and sweet melody and the sonic palate here is great. It’s a lyrical story of losing your way with a love you should have been more careful with handling. The album closes out with ‘Bunk Buggy’ and its big bassline riff and electronic synth sounds as their “daddy kills with a bunk buggy”.
‘Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse’ from Wet Kiss has a visceral live feel. This album won’t be for everyone, but if you want to take a walk on the wild side then give this album a spin or go see Wet Kiss live. I get the feeling that music is more than sonic waves and spontaneous performance art is a part of the experience.
