(Self-released, digital)
During the kickoff of “Dicks,” the third track on the Obvious Tells’ latest LP, Push Comes to Shove., singer Jessica Amelia makes a bold proclamation: “You have to stop having strong emotions about penises,” she says as drums rumble in the background, building toward an explosion of pounding hardcore music. “Like, we, as a society, have got to stop caring about dicks!”
Those lyrics could serve as the thesis of Push Comes to Shove., the second album from the Burlington punk project that is essentially a solo endeavor for Amelia, who is transgender. The pummeling, brutal collection of hardcore anthems is suffused with the singer’s rage.
From the first track, “Shapeshifter,” Amelia unloads both barrels on a society from which she feels cut off, a world of transphobes and right-wingers trying to impose an identity that she refuses.
“Faggot to fetish to unfuckable mess,” she snarls on the song. “You laugh at my face and you stare at my breasts / I’m a shapeshifter, I manipulate gaze / Change presentation just to feel safe.”
The record’s 10 tracks seethe with unrestrained fury, from the brutal “Truscum,” which channels ’80s power-violence punks Infest, to “Only 90’s Kids Remember,” a harrowing retelling of figuring out one’s sexual identity as a kid in the meat grinder of American public schools.
Amelia channels her anger into a drive to effect change, to create a world where her loved ones won’t have to struggle to find themselves as much as she did. As she bellows in “Chosen Family,” she wants her daughters to live peacefully in the world instead of “watching it burn around us.”
As strident as the lyrics are, the raw, ferocious punk energy that Amelia generates as the Obvious Tells is even harsher — somewhere between the brainy, righteous fury of Washington, D.C., punks Minor Threat and Baltimore hardcore act Trapped Under Ice. Or, as she puts it in the mission statement on the Obvious Tells’ Bandcamp page, “I’m not trying to make hardcore queer, I’m trying to make the queers hardcore.”
Punk music and queerness have always been a good match. A genre predicated on freedom of choice and individuality, not to mention raising the middle finger to regressive authority, is the perfect mode for music with this much passion, anger and political bite.
That’s not to say hardcore itself is always a welcoming place. Early punk scenes, including at Burlington’s own 242 Main, were notoriously heteronormative and male-dominated. Amelia knows all too well that even in punk music, there are divisions. “Hardcore pride is a fucking sham,” she sings on “Pride,” a 40-second blast of power chords and breakbeats. “You left us at the curb when the fights began.”
Push Comes to Shove. is no easy listen, even if you like it loud and fast. But there is beauty in that anger, a sense of cathartic release, a primal scream that keeps on going.
Push Comes to Shove. is available at theobvioustells.bandcamp.com.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2024.
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