Sadie Dupuis has a knack for flipping the aperçu into self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m blessed with perfect pitch/I waste it on songs that you never even heard of,” the singer-guitarist taunts on Twerp Verse. Even better is: “You hate the title, but you’re diggin’ the song,” which isn’t actually prophetic because you can praise without equivocation Speedy Ortiz’s flair for the splendid title—this is a band whose digital self-released debut sported “Kinda Blew” and “Phish Phood.” Tense, knotted, suspicious of climaxes, their third official album is the right album at the right time for them.
For one, Dupuis hits a new peak of clarity. Self-composure distinguishes her from the competition; she would rather trace the filigrees of a wryness as endemic to her as it is to forebears Robert Forster and Liz Phair than give the impression that the inarticulate and often clueless men who populate these songs bother her. As her melody line follows the sinews of the intro riff of “Can I Kiss You?,” she seems to think out the degrees of lust necessary to make her jump through hoops for the sake of a boy. On “Alone with Girls,” drummer Michael Falcone’s harmonies complement a story of abjuring the company of dumb dudes.
The virtues of Twerp Verse may present a challenge to the uninitiated. There simply aren’t many hummable moments in the conventional sense; Speedy Ortiz don’t do those, or, rather, their songs act as Trojan horses from which hooks suddenly appear. Dupuis and occasional guitarist Andy Molholt love riffs, and when they tangle in the outro of “Moving In” the result is a beautiful cacophony. “Backslidin’” depends on a distorted slide riff. Although she has occasionally colored tunes with keyboards, Twerp Verse has explicit uses for them. The synth in “You Hate the Title” nods toward Sleater-Kinney’s kind of new wave, and is all the better for it. Suspicious of hysteria, Dupuis is content to repeat the title as if it were a mantra, not a hook. “Lean in When I Suffer,” almost as memorable, lurches like a car with bad shocks; its movement is the hook.
So, while Twerp Verse offers no tune as stick-like-glue as Foil Deer’s “The Graduates” or Major Arcana’s “Plough” it offers compensatory pleasures. They’re the kind of band whose lyrics, I like to imagine, would appear as witticisms in high school yearbooks—a shared passion of Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet’s otherwise incompatible characters in Lady Bird; a band out of which cults are made. Speedy Ortiz record albums as shared secrets between themselves and fans.
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