photo by Alex Howard
My only beef with Shybaby’s new single “Kiki Doesn’t Like It When You Leave Me At The Party” (“KDLIWYLMATP”) is that I wish it lasted a little longer at least because by the time Shybaby gets around to full-on caterwaulin’ and hollerin’ the titular phrase like a Lhasa Apso with its hair caught on fire the song is almost over, meaning we only get about 20 seconds of this glorious cacophony and having seen Shybaby perform live a couple times before I’m well aware cacophony is the band’s specialty…
…but don’t get it twisted cuz the song ain’t exactly Mantovanni up to that point (even tho’ Shybaby has a background as a violist!) instead it’s more an exercise in barely controlled chaos as Shybaby the band lays into the song’s main riff as if they’re the reformed Stooges recording take #78 of “T.V. Eye” as total delirium fully sets in, over which Shybaby the singular human being monologues in full-on Karen O Beast Mode about the pros and cons of polyamory (“I’d never had anyone stick around so long” versus “your glassy eyes, they looked right through me”) broken up by a couple earworm wordless hook sections that come off like a Gen Z-inflected millennial whoop…
…until finally all the built-up tension gets released in the final moments of “KDLIWYLMATP” as previously noted with the narrator realizing that something is deeply amiss when even her friend Kiki is taken aback at Shybaby’s poly paramour leaving her high and dry at the party they’d come to together to hit up an orgy with another member of the “polycule” instead, which is some Caligula-level chicanery right there but still who can’t relate on some level ammrite because like it or not whatever the flowchart of one’s relationship-related state of being happens to be, or not to be, we all just want to be loved in the end (didn’t mean it like that but…) or to at least not get our hearts broken for the umpteenth time…
…cuz whatever the risks, fears, or frustrations may be, who isn’t compelled to keep going back to the well again and again and the Shybaby song is like that too because you’ll find yourself listening to it over and over again just to feel the dopamine rush of its tension-release dynamic–and even if there’s quantitatively more of the former (tension) the latter still looms larger (release) in qualitative terms and plus its briefness only brings you back wanting more and suddenly I get why that last part is only 20 seconds long…
…and it’s all a little like getting locked inside an empty U-Haul truck while the driver goes for a joy ride, save for an old armchair, a giant bowl of Fruit Loops, and some other assorted party favors to make the ride more pleasant until getting unceremoniously curbed atop the armchair just like in the music video for “KDLIWYLMATP” co-directed by Molly Mary O’Brien and Grace Eire aka Shybaby herself. (Jason Lee)