Words by Jason Lee; Cover photo by Malena Lloyd
I don’t know who you think I am
I don’t like the way you’re looking at me
I don’t know what’s going through your head
I didn’t dress this way for you IT’S FOR ME!
—“Unwanted Attention” by Crush Fund
At risk of being just another jerk projecting one’s own desires, anxieties, and other mental effluvia onto a trio of fiercely queer trans-punk riotous girls—namely Wendy Kya, Nora Knox, and July Brow who together comprise Crush Fund, a band whose name may have something to do with setting up a slush fund for trust-fund crust punks they have crushes on but probably not—we figure the best place to start when it comes to reviewing the band’s hotly anticipated new EP, New Fixation (ok it came out a few weeks ago on Blixworld Records but hey we got a staff of two here so give us a break already!) is to go the source itself…
Posed photo against graffitied wall: Malena Lloyd; Band photo against white backdrop by Pat Plush
…and so we begin by quoting from the band’s own Bandcamp on which they self-describe as a “fake punk girl band” which in only four words undercuts at least two common cultural shibboleths, namely, that womanhood rests upon a static, feminine essence (wassup, Simone de Beauvoir!) and likewise that punk rockers must adhere to certain values and visual aesthetics in order to not have their “authenticity” as punks questioned, which clearly the Crush Funders have no interest in doing, seeing as they dress and behave and play in a way that’s for them and not for you paraphrasing the lyric above, which itself is also core tenet of punk culture (rule-breaking iconoclasm) thus setting up the core paradox at the heart of punk which if you can somehow play both sides is like having your cake and crushing it too…
…a paradox Crush Fund doesn’t exactly shy away from either but instead confronts directly in touting their own “fakeness” however tongue-in-cheekly—nevermind the original meaning of “punk” being roughly equivalent to “queer” or the original meaning of “queer” being roughly equivalent to “fake” but hey this ain’t no etymology lesson—the larger point being that it’s about time someone took up the mantle of Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex and their dismissal of any such poppycock about what it means to be a “real” woman or a “real” punk by your standard patriarchal standards…
…instead re-claiming the original implications of punkdom in gleefully declaring, “I am a poseur…and I don’t care” sung from the POV of a brace-faced, mixed-race, barely-out-of-her-teens young woman with a penchant for day-go clothing (no black leather jacket uniform here) who grew up in a Brixton council estate all of which didn’t exactly fit that year’s model (nevermind this year’s model) of angry young white men (guilty as charged, except for the “young” part) to which Poly Styrene (RIP) famously replied “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”…
…thus becoming an iconic punk pioneer to this day (go figure) and it’s heartening to see a band like Crush Fund taking up the mantle of femme punk and highlighting gender performativity itself as part of a larger queer punk revolution that’s been sweeping the nation or maybe just NYC lately according to numerous sources by tapping into punk’s queer roots to make the movement accessible to sissies as much as cisgenders again…
…and sure maybe you’re thinking, “well that’s all well and good but what do they actually sound like” and on that crucial point we gotta say New Fixation is the most life affirmingly f*cking brutal sounding record we’ve heard in some time cuz in the 11 minutes and change it takes for the EP to unspool it’s as if you’ve entered an alternate reality where guitars sound downright frightening again through some strange alchemy and where you may fear for the fate of the drumset played on the record, nevermind the band members’ vocal cords what with all the feral chanting and shouting as if The Crystals went hardcore but retained their wall-of-sound production, flipping the gender of their notorious 1962 Goffin & King–penned anti-hit “(S)he Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” performed live on American Bandstand whilst pistol whipping Phil Spector with his own pistol live on national TV cuz that’s the alternative reality that we imagine the Crush Funders inhabiting…
…like on the EP’s opening track “Womanhood” which contrasts the confinement of normative lady-like behavior (“to be a woman is to be small / not short or weak / but cramped”) with the freedom of posing as and ultimately inhabitingan otherwise forbidden identity (“I was told I could be anything / I wanted to be / could I really be that free?”) on a song that’s equal parts “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Beat on the Brat” but fed through 2024 levels of sonic grime with the lyrics’ exploration of the paradoxical nature of womanhood mirrored in the narrow-ranged, confined melodic and harmonic range played mostly on a single chord in the verses…
….pitted against the anarchic, pile-driving forward motion of the rhythm section sounding like a pistol-driven locomotive about to jump the track and don’t even get us started on the “pit-churning fury” of the New Fixation‘s next song “Tender is the Night” that’s about “an illicit tryst in the park that quickly dissolves to reveal it is a masturbatory fantasy” (too perfect a description not to quote here) which again celebrates the power of the pose and of the imagination “a liquid languid stupor wash[ing] over” one’s consciousness so powerfully that it re-shapes external reality like a queer Walter Mitty which is like having your cake and crushing it too and why in the world wouldn’t everyone in the world wanna aspire to this level of self-determination…
…and then next there’s the steamrolling in-the-red refrain of “Unwanted Attention” which requests, nay demands, that you get off the band’s collective girl-dick (paraphrasing here!) coming in for the first time at 1:17 and after hearing this part you’ll likely submit to their request cuz it sounds as if the band have been transformed into demons playing inside a working cement mixer in hell as flying chunks of grit and gravel piercing their instruments and speaker cones before emerging out the discharge chute in the form of a heavy slab of molten sonic concrete poured directly into your earholes with the EP finally riding off into the sunset with “W.W.Y.D.” which features a herky-jerky, queer-metered groove akin to The Gossip crossed with Death Grips playing a set of Devo covers or something along those lines lest anyone doubt Crush Fund’s dance-punk credentials…
…all of which captured with startling fidelity to Crush Fund’s crushing live sets and stage presence as you’d experience at some local dive drenched in blood-red lighting and bordello-decored like the aptly named Purgatory with the trio teetering on the brink of total chaos but never quite falling into the abyss (it’s rare to hear a band with a sound this pulverizing captured with such crispness and clarity, and life-affirming brutality)…
…and BTW the album was recorded, produced, and engineered by Crush Fund’s very own guitarist/co-vocalist/occasional bassist Wendy Kya alongside Olive Faber (Sunflower Bean) at the latter’s Long Island studio and in the former’s bedroom with mastering provided by Violette Furton and an assistant engineering on several tracks by Pop Music Fever Dream’s very own Nicole Harwayne with one track (“Unwanted Attention”) produced by Marissa Paternoster at Lakehouse Recording Studios…
Photo (L): Truly Sin —- Photo (C): Eli a.k.a. sissymoth Photo (R): Pat Plush
…and that’s about as real as it gets when it comes to breaking the sound barrier just as Crush Fund and the trans-punk community in general seek to break socially imposed barriers erected by reactionary forces (maybe the only way they get erected?) constraining one’s own freedom of choice in affirming one’s own gender identity with even the Vatican getting into the act recently in declaring“sex change operations” (their words) to be a “grave threat” to human dignity on par with poverty, human trafficking, and warfare…
…in a document making clear that the same-sex marriage supporting Pope and his Bishops ain’t really the biggest fans of “gender theory” or (one can only assume) gender theory’s nonbinary “queen” either, Judith Butler, having no doubt highlighted the passage in their landmark 1990 treatise Gender Trouble stating that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” and drawn a big frowny face next to it in the margins nevermind that in the intervening years biologists have “increasingly argue[d] that a binary view of human sex is overly simplistic, and that sex should be viewed as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy in terms of anatomical, hormonal, and even cellular sex” but hey that’s a new fixation for another time…
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NEW FIXATION CREDITS
Womanhood, Tender is the Night-–
Recording Engineered by Olive Faber & Wendy Kya
Assistant Record Engineer: Nicole Harwayne
Mixed by Wendy Kya
Mastered by Violette Furton
Recorded at Olive’s studio in Long Island, New York, and Wendy Kya’s bedroom
Unwanted Attention–
Produced by Marissa Paternoster and Recorded by Eric Bennette & Paternoster at Lakehouse Recording Studios
Writing Credits:
Womanhood, Tender is the Night, Unwanted Attention:
Nora Knox: Lyrics, Vocals, Drums
Wendy Kya: Vocals, Guitar
July Brown: Bass
Thoughts—
Wendy Kya; Monologue sampled from Sarah Zedig (@letstalkaboutstuff)
W.W.Y.D.
Wendy Kya: Lyrics, Vocals, Guitar, Bass
Nora Knox: Lyrics, Vocals, Drums
Crush Fund is Wendy Kya, Nora Knox, and July Brown
Special Thanks:
Jaqueline Codiga, Ekko Astral, Anita Velveeta <3
Blixworld Records 005