EULA - Wool Sucking (2015)

It’s easy to make assumptions about Brooklyn trio EULA based on the company they keep: They’ve been a regular opening act for Mission of Burma and recorded their latest album with NYC underground vet Martin Bisi (who had a hand in the nastiest Sonic Youth and Swans records), while frontwoman Alyse Lamb recently extolled the virtues of Lydia Lunch on Michael Azerrad’s site The Talkhouse. And it’s a rather fortuitous coincidence that the band’s scabrous sophomore album, Wool Sucking, should drop at the same time that Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band hit shelves to re-stoking interest in the early '80s East Coast avant-punk scene to which EULA pledge spiritual allegiance. But just as New York is a vastly different place than it was 30 years ago, EULA put a friendly face on an aesthetic synonymous with self-loathing nihilism. They may be trudging through the same sewers as their forbears, but they’re greatful for the sunlight poking through the grates.

Wool Sucking is, in essence, an album of love songs, though Lamb isn’t so much interested in communicating passion as transmitting what it does to you physiologically—the destabilizing sense of vulnerability, the sweaty-palmed nervousness, the heart-racing agitation. This is an album where every come-on doubles as a grave warning ("I collapse into you/ Be careful what you do… can you handle nasty weather?"), where caring too much leads to cardiac arrest ("My heart needs an orderly/ To keep it from exploding"), where innocence blurs into innuendo ("I could love you/ Like a mother"). Lamb was a ballet kid, and you can sense that appreciation for theatricality in her acrobatic, acquired-taste vocals, which allow her to harmonize and play call-and-response with herself as if trying to give all the competing voices in her head an equal say. The music behind her is equally excitable and unsettled, a roiling tempest of blues-battered scuzz ("Meadows" revs up like the Allmans’ "Whipping Post" relocated to an S&M dungeon), doomsday basslines, and fractious drum patterns that imagines where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might be today if they never returned Interscope’s phone calls.

At times, EULA’s impulsive energy can manifest into ineffectual thrashing (see: "Aplomb"), but, in light of their more scattered 2011 debut, Maurice Narcisse—which absorbed influences from disco to cow-punk—Wool Sucking wisely focuses on what the band do best: writhing rockers and disquieting, oddly affecting ballads. In the latter mode, not only do EULA project a surprising emotional depth, but—through the deceptively calm pastorales of "The Destroyer" and “Monument”—also liberate themselves from the New York skronk-punk tradition to which they’re so often tied. And the quieter presentation only amplifies the symbiotic relationship between desire and destruction that forms the core of this album. When Lamb sings, "I will take your beat/ If you will take my heart" on the chilling, dying-embered torch song "Your Beat", you’re not sure if she's exchanging wedding vows or forging a suicide pact.