Perfect Pussy

Say Yes To Noise…and Community:
Perfect Pussy Leaves Home, But Not to Escape the Dicks

“I’m what they call a social introvert. When I found that out I found it kind of liberating.”

I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the people who consider themselves introverts, musicians both unflinchingly confessional (Sharon Van Etten) and fearlessly gregarious (tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus) willing to walk alone onto a stage in front of thousands. But I’ve never heard the claim from someone as opinionated as Meredith Graves, or from the frontperson of a band as willfully confrontational as Perfect Pussy.

“I like talking to people, I’m very friendly, but it’s difficult for me to get close to people and I prefer to spend about 90 percent of my time alone. There just aren’t many of us who are very open about it. I play a show, I DJ. And then I come home, fix a cup of tea, read a book, and I stay in until the next time I have to leave the house,” Graves tells me by phone while home alone on a weekday morning, cooking eggs. “The guys will tell you I’m a liar, that after a show I’m the person that has to be grabbed and corralled to the van. But if kids hang out and want to talk, I stay until the last person leaves. Then by the end of the night I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”

“The guys” are Graves’ four Perfect Pussy bandmates, who make enough of a hardcore racket to leave their audiences feeling leveled by a truck – in the best possible sense. Last spring at Mammal Gallery, I stood roughly five feet from Graves and literally couldn’t hear the slightest sound coming out of her mouth, such was the force of the band’s onslaught. And while I won’t say that didn’t matter, amazingly it didn’t torpedo the power of the show. After the set the doorman shook his head and shared with a wry smile, “I feel so sorry for the sound guy. They came in with such powerful gear there was no way the house PA could handle the vocals.” “We get that a lot – a lot of time it has to do with the shape of the room” Graves explains, somewhat apologetically. “But you’d be surprised what you can do with intensity of the body.”

It’s not like Graves’ lyrics are all that intelligible in the studio either, despite the obvious care she places in the words. Yet it’s not something she sees as a deficiency, or anything she plans to change. “I don’t really love the quality of my voice,” Graves admits, before launching into a tirade that comes across more as good natured venting at an invisible “them” than an expression of true anger. “I think that everyone needs to shut the hell up and let me do whatever I want. If you don’t like it, go start your own band – that’s what I did. Everyone please collectively stop acting like this is the first time in the world where you’ve heard a hardcore band and you can’t understand the lyrics. When kids are singing along it’s not because you can hear the singer, it’s because they sat in their rooms and listened to the record, read the lyric sheet. If I didn’t want people to know what I was saying I wouldn’t say it, and I wouldn’t print a lyric sheet, black text on white paper, in Times New Fucking Roman, or whatever the most legible thing is a person could ever read.”

Take note of “Interference Fits,” which Graves calls the most personal song she’s ever written and which amply rewards such a trip to the lyric sheet. It also provides the title of Perfect Pussy’s album, though in context Say Yes to Love reads more like a rhetorical question than an exhortation. The full line is “Since when do we say yes to love?” and since the preceding line is “When did we all decide to give up?” it’s easy to infer her stance on the matter. According to Graves, the notion stems from a time when her close friends suddenly began to pair up and get married. She’s also been open with the info that the breakup of her former band, the not that dissimilar Shoppers, coincided with Graves extricating herself from an abusive relationship. That situation, combined with her public jousting with a Syracuse hardcore scene she considers overly dude-centric, would seem to explain Graves’ relocation to the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn from her lifelong upstate New York home – but Graves contends that’s not the case. “For once I wasn’t escaping a bad situation, but moving towards a good one.” She moved this past September “on a whim, and it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. I was homesick for NYC when I was in Europe because of the community I’d been working on developing here, and it hit me that I wouldn’t be able to fully merge with that unless I was physically present. I’m happier, more inspired and fulfilled here than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Another revelation of Perfect Pussy’s live set was that the walls of what I assumed to be guitar feedback were actually emanating from Sean Sutkus’s sublimely malevolent analog synths. “We try not to, but we occasionally play without Sean – he’s a tour manager for other bands – and it’s still noisy without him. A lot of the feedback is the way we run my vocals, and the guitar and bass, thru the PA. Sean’s been doing this for a long time – we try to get him as best we can.”

As for Perfect Pussy’s current location, “We are all over – Sean is madly in love with a woman who lives down here, so he decided to drop everything and now lives with his amazing girlfriend. Garrett (drummer Koloski) and his long term partner own a house in Syracuse.” Perfect Pussy wasn’t planning to tour the US this year but as Graves says, “Dude, it was because of Deerhoof. I’ve loved them since I was 15.” Clearly that’s a call the quintet – in whatever permutation – couldn’t refuse.

“Everyone in our band is in other bands, some involving each other. We’re a very loose collective – anyone in our band, if they’re working in collaboration with others from our inner circle, can use the name.” For instance, studio creations labeled “Perfect Pussy remixes” are the handiwork of Sutkus and guitarist Ray McAndrew. “Right now we’re going through – I wouldn’t even call them lineup changes, but different people playing with us for awhile. Our bass player got a gig playing bass for Swans, so Allie Donahue of Potty Mouth is coming to Australia with us – for the first time we have another woman in the band!”

This gender imbalance is surprising given Graves’ outspoken views on feminism. “Everyone in my band is a feminist. I wouldn’t be in a band with four dudes if they weren’t awesome people. I have one of the strongest BS filters of any person I know when it comes to politics. I mean, I can have a hard time getting to know people because of my politics, and people not wanting to get to know me.” Soon after, however, Graves seemingly contradicts herself. “I’ve had people bitch at me before for saying men can’t be feminists. Men can’t be feminists for the same reason that white people can’t make conversations on race all about them. But men can be feminist allies – they can understand feminism and talk about feminism. When I say ‘male feminist’ I mean it as disparagingly as ‘female singer.’ I feel a need to specify it because it’s not normal.” When I point out the discrepancy Graves readily amends her statement – the men of Perfect Pussy are feminist allies. “Keep me talking long enough and I’m bound to contradict myself,” she laughs. And it all seems well-intentioned, the product of a rapid-fire talker brimming with ideas and grateful for the podium. And given the time for reflection on the printed page, Graves can present quite cogent arguments. She’s a regular contributor to the Talkhouse and Rookie websites, and was heading that evening to the Pitchfork Review release party, doing a reading of her piece taking Mark Kozelek to task for the inherent homophobia of his notorious late 2013 squabble with The War On Drugs.

As of last summer Graves was on record as saying she and her mates had yet to make a penny from Perfect Pussy. Given the breakout success (by DIY standards) of Say Yes To Love and a smattering of festival appearances extending as far as Portugal I figured that had changed, but she insists that isn’t the case. “Nope – Still broke. I don’t have any fucking money. Who would pay me to exist and share my opinions? I’m basically the spoiled trust fund kid of my record label, and I refuse to feel bad about that because it means I can take better care of my friends. I’m honored to have them believing in me.”

This patronage includes employment at the record shop of Perfect Pussy’s label, Captured Tracks, which recently reissued the band’s debut cassette, I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling – most of the five tracks of which appeared in live versions that round out Say Yes To Love. And it extends to Graves’ own imprint, Honor Press, in partnership with Captured Tracks’ owner Mike Sniper. Honor’s first release will be Graves’ own photo journal documenting the band’s first year of touring. She’s also planning both new releases and reissues. “The first three should be out in short order, which means in the next six months, because I guess that’s how labels work.” She’s rather guarded on details for fear of jinxing them, but teases that the reissues include “one of my favorite records ever, an obscure emo band from the early ’90s.” Her parameters for Honor Press are quite open ended. “If one of my friends wants to make a movie, I’ll support that too.”

Graves’ resume includes a bevy of DIY hardcore bands – she started out on drums, and shifted to guitar in Shoppers, with whom she recalls playing at Wonderoot “on one of the worst nights of my life – I got busted for possession and manhandled by the Georgia police.” Nonetheless, she reports that two of her favorite bands in the world hail from Georgia.

After first namechecking Warehouse and plugging their forthcoming release Graves asks me, “Do you know anything about the band Georges Bataille Battle Cry? I would play with them every time if I had the opportunity. We played the Drunken Unicorn, and after our set I went to the bar side because you can smoke over there (she’s now trying to quit). There was this boy sitting next to me reading a book – he was wearing a suit and he looked like Andy Partridge. I was talking to either Sean or Ray, and they’re drunk and asking me questions like ‘what is art?’ So my bandmate leaves and I turn around and I honestly think this guy was reading Robespierre or something like that. I’m really shy and I never do stuff like this, it must have been the whiskey or the environment but I just reached over and took one of his cigarettes without even asking. And I knew this total stranger had been half listening, so I took up the conversation and was totally enamored with him. And he turned out to be their lead singer. And they were one of the most violent bands I’ve ever seen in my life. This boy was beating himself in the face with a ride cymbal for half the set and it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. I don’t understand why that band isn’t super famous. I got one of their shirts and I wore it on stage for a long time because I figured anyone who knew who that band was would be my friend.” John Lloyd Hannah’s recently grown beard moots the Andy Partridge comparison, and his band has since shortened its name to Bataille, but in an email exchange he recalls the evening well. “I remember discussing a variety of subjects with her from Metallica to Zizek, to clothing alterations and the literature department at Syracuse University. She is a radical vocalist with an insight that can cut like a falling scythe matched by a band whose sound encapsulates a frenetic and ecstatic rage; to receive such high compliments from Meredith Graves is completely flattering.”

Actually, Perfect Pussy marks the first time this radical vocalist has taken on a single-threaded role. “I quickly realized it was a mistake I couldn’t undo,” Graves recalls about the band’s formation. “What I said was ‘I want to be in a band where I only have to do one thing,’ because I’ve always pulled double duty. What I should have said was ‘I just want to play guitar.” So now my voice is destroyed, but it’s fine. I’ll have to see a doctor eventually, but I have a couple of tours to get through first.”

Graves refers to herself as “a girl from the North Country” with only a moderate dose of irony – her Brooklyn foray marks the first time she’s lived outside of upstate New York. “My mom was a singer and my dad was a broadcast journalist, so I was kind of raised to do this. When I was kid I was always made to feel ‘this is where your natural talent lies and you’re not very good at anything else so I hope you want to be a writer and a singer.’” She performed in musicals from an early age, and learned to sew in high school in a gambit to move backstage once she decided she was done with the footlights. “In college (St. Lawrence University) I worked at the theater as a stitcher. I was not cool in college – I was very hard to deal with – and my instructor there taught me for better or worse how to be the boss of my own life. She rules.” Over the course of the conversation Graves refers to several friends and associates (including Captured Tracks’ Sniper and music writer Michael Azerrad, her Talkhouse editor) as “the best person ever,” all with heartfelt appreciation. But she saves the greatest admiration for her bandmates, who she calls her best friends. “These guys are my family, my life.”

“I was a weird kid – my mom raised me with Broadway soundtracks and my Dad with Husker Du and the Clash – which didn’t seem weird to me at all.” Perhaps surprisingly given the sturm and drang over her own relationships, Graves is from an intact family. “It’s like my mom is Diana Krall and my dad is Elvis Costello – it’s not the same, but we know it works.”

Her sewing background also provided Graves with a bankable skill during her Syracuse DIY days. “I worked at a high end women’s formal wear retailer as an alterationist. I hemmed a lot of prom dresses. Most of our clientele was teenage girls so I would hang out with them all day, help them pick out prom dresses, then I’d shorten them, take in zippers, repair sequins.” I love the image of a generation of North Country debutantes someday telling their neighbors, “Perfect Pussy was my personal shopper for prom.”

So what comes next? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. “We’ve had no expectations placed on us. It’s great – we’re the luckiest people in the world. I don’t think I’ve heard a single person say, ‘Wow I really hope Perfect Pussy puts out another record.’ We’re pretty insane – people are like ‘OK, you guys do what you want and we’ll give it a shot.’”

Whatever that something turns out to be, it’s a safe bet we’ll hear about it.

Photo by Drew Reynolds.