GENDER IS THE BASTARD - PANSY ELECTRONICS

 

Released: January 18

PANSY ELECTRONICS is an album that is extremely intense in both sonic quality and subject matter. As an openly queer person, Danny of GENDER IS THE BASTARD takes their experience with facing open hostility toward them and turns it into a seething mess of noisy rage. Each track on the album has its own unique attributes and message with some being affirmations and others being reactions. For example, "QUEER NOISE FOREVER" is a solid five minutes of wordless scathing noise that oscillates wildly in texture but maintains a high screeching pitch throughout. But even with its abrasive severity, it still manages to feel somewhat celebratory in its mood. 

On the other end of the spectrum, there are two tracks in particular that feel like a violent rejection of homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic attitudes that plague society, even is circles that you might assume are more accepting. "ABANDONING WHITEHOUSE" is a heated rejection of such attitudes using a band notorious for proliferating those attitudes in the noise scene. The second track is far more personal, however, and is actually the first recorded instance of this track as it is usually reserved only for live performance. "I WAS CALLED A F*GGOT" is a seething retort to the use of the slur as experienced by the author themselves. The whole album is extremely charged politically but also keeps a specifically personal feel to it. It never becomes anything too far abstracted from the real experience of its creator and feels very concrete, like the listener gets to have these experiences by proxy complete with the anger and emotional charge they created.