PISS Hold the Mirror Up
The Vancouver hardcore band’s lyrical narratives tackle trauma in unflinching and poetic ways.
By Khagan Aslanov
Photos by Adolfo Bermudez
- Published on
Zantingh, a teacher of literacy for kids with learning difficulties, is a visceral lyric writer with a curt, literary touch. A survivor of sexual violence, her processing of past experiences forms the linchpin of PISS’ primal anger. That impetus carries into the music – hardcore at heart with an avant-garde slant, ugly and atonal, sliced with anguished field recordings. PISS’ unhinged live shows are awe-inspiring.
There are some pivot points to tether the band’s sound to punk and no wave’s history, and one can comfortably say that they channel both the desolate, feminine anger of Penis Envy-era Crass and the brutalized, limb-wrenching loudness of early Swans. Hell, there is even some of the compositional nihilism of Coltrane’s Ascension happening here. But even then, with all these things measured and taken into account, PISS stand as a singularity.
Their upcoming debut album, an expected continuation of the excellent EP currently making the rounds and a wrenching reflection on the importance of personal safety, already feels like a contender for one of the most important punk records in recent history.
“I was writing about how violence has impacted my body, my voice, my life,” Zantingh says. “In the creation of this album, that story was continuing, because I was then having a healing experience, of having people put their hands on it in a gentle, loving and generative way.”
In a sense, PISS feels less like a band writing socially engaged music, and more like a performance art piece, a fully conceived document of tending to trauma and grief and emerging on the other side more human somehow. The band seem very aware that sustaining this integrity without cheapening it puts an expiration date on the proceedings; the longer PISS, in this formation, continue, the more they run the risk of tumbling into simulacrum.
“The album is a pretty clear and finely crafted narrative arc. And whatever we do next, we want it to represent growth,” she says. “What happened in my childhood, I have been sitting in it and I am now 30 years old. I have digested this portion of my life. So what happens after this rage, this release? After this album, we want to make something that has more hope, something that is constructive. At the same time, everything I do will be coloured with that brush. I don’t really know how we will do that yet. But that’s the only way to make this sustainable.”
As our talk goes on, it quickly becomes clear how tightly-knit this band is. They giggle at inside jokes, nervously discuss their upcoming international tour, give each other time to speak fully, and seem to exist in a space of utmost camaraderie. For a group of people who have devoted their craft to stripping the cauterized sheen off our behaviours, they pulse with life and an excitement of things to come.
At one point, they take a moment to celebrate guitarist Tyler Paterson: “I get so much attention because I’m so loud. But Ty is the silent engine that powers PISS,” Zantingh gushes, while Paterson smiles with awkward humility.
“There is a recording on my phone of us just fucking around with repetitions of a phrase. And Tyler suggests we do 2, 3, 4, 5. And we all lose it. There are all these joyous moments of chaotic mapping in these jam spaces, of us trying to make songs as good as we can,” says drummer Garreth Roberts.
“We spent four or five days in the studio, and came out with a full album that we are so incredibly proud of and eager for everyone to hear. It was genuinely so much fun,” adds Paterson.
To snare the vitality of their live shows, for their upcoming full-length, PISS recorded all the instruments and most of the vocals live off the floor. Whatever vox were recorded separately were done in one take, to preserve and capture the discretely vital aspects of their live shows – the breathiness of Zantingh between screaming bouts, the small sour notes slipping in between the caterwauls.
I have been talking about PISS to anyone and everyone since seeing them live, and the range of reactions those talks have had reveals the darker side of how people perceive a band that tackles human bondage in such a candid, unflinching way. Whether outwardly vocal or in a passively carcinogenic manner, the boldness and honesty that PISS embodies will inevitably provoke some pushback. They will be dismissed as “the trauma band,” or vacuously greeted as a collective that makes furious songs, without looking into what that fury is trying to say.
That turning is made all the more grotesquely obvious in hardcore bars, spaces that traditionally have been buckling under the weight of white, male rage. I saw a glimpse of that simmering conflict at a recent PISS show during Sled Island Music Festival in Calgary. The first two rows of the crowd were composed of mostly women, communing with the music in a heart-rendingly profound way. People were holding each other and crying. But behind them, a moshing wall of men pushed against their backs. It was a disturbing and conflicting sight, callous and brutal and tender and disarming. When I mention this moment, Zantingh nods gravely.
“I struggle with it. I don’t know how to manage it, or if I should. Firstly, I don’t want to tell anyone what to do with their bodies at our shows. Getting pushed or hit is very normal at hardcore shows, but it affects me deeply,” she says. “At the same time, hardcore spaces are a place where people can freely express anger, which is not something that’s available in the wild. I try to think about PISS as a way to call people in, to investigate what’s underneath that anger. We want people to feel free to do what they want, but to reflect on it, as it happens. That is what the character of the album is doing in their narrative arc.”
That is the corollary that rears when you make music that stares back at the ossified menace of the human condition without blinking. Unlike most socially conscious bands that ply an abstract trade, screaming banalities into a roomful of people who showed up because they already agree with them, PISS burrow intrepidly into the most discomforting and enduring aspects of our collective ugliness.
But there are no didactics or a dais to be found here. All PISS ask of you is, for once, not to avert your eyes or ears.
Photo by Grace Grignon
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