Armed with music-creation software and high-concept inspiration from a selection of books, the duo of Jenny Pulse and
Tim Kinsella dove headfirst into the creation of a twisted, meditative, and unexpectedly slinky debut album for their project
Good Fuck. Pulse was already well familiar with programming minimal electronic tracks, while
Kinsella has become a decorated art rock veteran and core songwriter for fringe bands like
Joan of Arc, Owls, Make Believe, and others. The pair retreated from their home in Chicago to an artists' colony in upstate New York to begin from square one on the music that ultimately became this eponymous debut.
Good Fuck sounds very much like the product of a highly focused mission, with songs and sounds blending into each other. The tone is set on album opener "We Keep It Light," where looming, distorted kick drums, noisy synth buzzes, and slithering electronics twist around chopped-up fragments of unison spoken word and other vocalizations. The energy of the song, and much of the album, is heavy without being aggressive, leaning more into an omnipresent eeriness and sense of anxiety that simmers but never blows up. Undercurrents of dread, sex, and derangement run through all the songs, sometimes all happening at once. The stuttering beat and Pulse's delay-coated vocals on "Saint Francis" create an uneasy, but somehow pleasantly demented groove. The tabla samples and sparkling synth melodies of "Spring Song" are similar, with a nervous energy that could easily build into something menacing, but never does. Pulse's vocals are in full focus on "Spring Song," and they build into a harmony that meshes with a string arrangement for one of the more beautiful moments of the album.
Kinsella turns away from his standard yelped vocals, favoring a more subdued approach, even opting for spoken tones on scrambled tracks like "Secret Meetings." The weird but sensuous world
Good Fuck drafts on these songs envisions a more internal reading of early
Xiu Xiu, where Jamie Stewart's theatrical singing and pummeling musical catharsis are subtracted, leaving only the weird, almost sexy dark ambience. Equal parts pulsing bass lines, bizarre lyrical experiments, and wild contrasts,
Good Fuck is a challenging record at times, but deep listening reveals Pulse and
Kinsella handling every move with a sharp control, guiding the thresholds of chaos to their exact specifications on every track. ~ Fred Thomas