Chances are, you’ve heard Waitress and their five-track EP a thousand times already—it’s every loud and trashy scrap Albini slapped together; Fugazi without the fervor; Unwound without the tension; Rodan without the complexity; Minutemen without the wit or funk.
Yes, the band can shred, and stop-and-start with enough conviction. But then singer Brian McGhee lopes into the picture, as if he’s already marked his territory and needs only to sit on his ass while others sweat out the details. “So what if I wanna kiss black girls?” he declares on “Year of the Bad Spider,” to which I reply, “I dunno, so what?”
But the anti-climax of “Two-Story Lava Lamp” dips the lowest: “Are you a boy/ Or a girl?” he asks, and repeats twice, just to emphasize how clever and funny he is. It’s the biggest cock-thrust on the EP (incidentally, the band pegs itself as “cock-rock” on Bandcamp), but McGhee tosses it out with all the gusto of a cud-chewing cow.
And that’s what bothers me, really: Waitress has ransacked a radical genre, gutted out its grey matter and pumped in semen and booze. Nothing tears off ears or turns heads around.
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