Depending on your tolerance for puns, Gaytheist may have one of the best names in contemporary heavy rock, or one of the most annoying. Many of their song titles walk a similar line between what’s funny and what’s cloyingly ironic. Their last record, Let’s Jam Again Soon (2017), offered arch fare like “Avenged Seven-minute Abs,” “Let’s Get Astrophysical” and “sCraps.” If wordplay and postmodern meta- maneuvers were all the band had to offer, this reviewer would be inclined to take a pass. But Gaytheist has always provided substance that operates in excess of the snarky surfaces. The band integrates melodically inclined noise rock (think Betty-period Helmet), sludgy grunge and the occasional measure of spiky post-punk into exciting, mostly uptempo musical forms.
And the jokey stuff? Sometimes it’s not just silly.
In some ways, the band’s name isn’t a pun at all: Jason Rivera, who sings and plays guitar, is indeed a gay atheist. The songs deliver on the political bent you might expect, though always with the imprint of Rivera’s queer sensibility. “It’s Reigning Men” alludes to the Weather Girls’ song, long an anthem at gay clubs. But Gaytheist’s tune reconfigures the sort of “reign” those men exert over the others in their midst. Rivera sings, “I must have control / Over your body / I am a man after all.” Gaytheist’s song doesn’t celebrate sexual freedom, it satirizes sexual oppression — of women, for sure, but also of queer folks and of sexual pleasures that move outside of spaces and practices policed by traditional. “Border Patrol” invokes rightwing xenophobia as a metaphor for other sorts of border crossings. Rivera yells, “Get in here by any means / Cuz I’m right here on my fucking knees / Get in here illegally / I have so much to show you.” It’s an invitation, summoning the repressed libidinal longings that drive so much hatred of queer sexualities. At the end of each line, the rest of the band shouts “Fuck yeah!” in hyper-masculine chorus. It sounds like a song from the Fluid’s Roadmouth (1989), but it repurposes the macho swagger of grunge into queer affirmation.
The clash of surface values and manifest affect reaches a climax with the album’s closing track, “Doing Great! Never Better!” The title sounds like a worrisome answer to someone’s idle question: “How you doing?” The hyperbole verges on nervy, jittery overcompensation. Anyone hearing such a response would see through it. And the song itself doesn’t attempt any ironies. Rivera sings, “Please don’t go, don’t leave me here / I ain’t got nobody else.” His bandmates Nickolis Parks and Timothy Hoff thump and crunch away under mammoth power chords, like Skinyard covering Cheap Trick’s At Budokan. Just when you think the song can’t get any bigger or more fulsome with pathos, it lurches into a lower gear. Its last minute is a thunderous dirge, Rivera and crew shouting, “Don’t goooooooooo! / Don’t goooooooooo!” No cleverness, no games. Just urgent plea. One wonders what a more emotionally direct collection of songs from Gaytheist might sound like. For now, this record works hard to balance the band’s tendency toward smart-assery with sharp notes of humanity. It works pretty well. — dusted