Team Dresch’s second album, Captain My Captain, was released in 1996. In this big, real world of ours, a lot has changed since 1996. On its third album, this wonderful band of queercore/riot grrrl pioneers adapts its weltanschauung, not to the events or politics it would joyfully have crucified in the ‘90s (through zines or through Fagetarian and Dyke), but predominantly to the advent of change itself.
Furthermore doesn’t feel like an angry album. There is a basic nostalgia element that immediately breathes into One Song’s rose-smelling expedition in which youthful vitriol is banished to make room for appreciation of the helping hands that aided Jody Bleyle in making it to this point, not to mention, self. We’re content enough to avow being “barefoot in the summer with nowhere to go”.
The album is celebratory, a love letter to life and whatever positives we may claim from it. Even John Goodmanson did some mixing on it – fewer male allies mean as much to riot grrrl as John. A late career comeback, with roses on the nose, isn’t always going to fuel the sort of recklessness many of us love Captain and Personal Best for – we’re given the euphoric rush of reunion, the nerves of reunion, and the small talk of reunion – and the album’s mid-to-late portion, ramming the songs in for the benefit of a “finished product” does admit to less of an integral project than Dresch’s classics.
It’s also not that visceral, but can be. The semi-typical grunge riffing of I’ve Really Become Some Thing teases typifying the album, but the jellyfish-stinging riffs of And Now Your Face prove, not just the musical craft of Kaia Wilson and Jody Bleyle especially, but a retained penchant for guts. They’re also capable of purely tense heatedness where Every Owl Leaves is concerned.
Team Dresch historically doesn’t care about musical clarity, but will use it when necessary, on unshielded personal accounts such as Don’t Try Suicide or Remember Who You Are. Unconfigurable, disfigured guitar palettes emerge once more on Heard a Bang, untucking itself only to reveal chord changes that feel like knife-y nails down one’s neck, even pointier than the blade-edge minor chords on Protectors.
There I go proclaiming the album’s themes of change and then talking about the sonic aspects instead. Change is prominent, harsh on Jamie, captured not only by its themes of ‘keeping it together’ amid change, but a combination of rhythmic propulsion and off-kilter vocal leads that feel like heavy breezes, enough to knock you off your feet. Its pileups of mood, that perpetuate as the song does, feel like those classic Team Dresch songs like 107, that observe great storms.
Still Your Room and Last One at the Party are harsher by subject, both songs, to varying levels, opening themselves up to the discussion of loved ones no longer being in our lives.
The band’s politics are always going to haunt their music, explicitly or not. Where change applies to much of the tracklist, political specifics arrive primarily on Growing Underground, which might be the album’s best song. In this case, it’s identity, it’s biology, the cis male politicking of a woman or transperson’s body. Team Dresch say “if somebody else fears it, we’ll happily let them crumble to that fear”. What they actually say – you know, literally – is “you can’t erase us”, over the all-together-now rage, unity and panic in one, featured on the song’s chorus.
So, there is a rage, not as jagged or visceral as ‘90s rage, but it’s there, and it does save Furthermore from sounding like a comfy, late career album the likes of which we know too well. There’s an ease – at the most, a relief – to a heroic punk band of yesteryear not Black Flagging its comeback. Is that enough to classify Furthermore a great album? Of course not, but my god am I glad Team Dresch didn’t Black Flag its comeback.
Best tracks – Growing Underground – Jamie.
Rating – 7 out of 10
