At its inception, punk wasn’t just an attack on ’70s rock excess but on the very idea of entertainment. By holding up a mirror shard to society’s ills, punk’s message was that entertainment-as-escapism was a luxury we could no longer afford. When the E-word is dropped in a punk context, it hits like an F-bomb—from Gang of Four’s Entertainment! to Sleater-Kinney’s “Entertain,” the sentiment is dripping in sarcasm and spite. So when Nots singer/guitarist Natalie Hoffman shouts “Entertain me/Tell me who to be!” on her band’s second album, she’s in good, caustic company: By setting her crosshairs on the conformist, intellectually corrosive effects of pop culture, she reminds us that punk’s primary function is not to amuse, but to abuse.
“Entertain Me” is the sneering last song on Cosmetic, the follow-up to the Memphis foursome’s 2014 debut, We Are Nots. For a band that once dealt in 48-second blurts, the track’s seven-minute sprawl offers a convincing gauge of their growth; their double-timed rhythmic thrust stretches out hypnotically as Hoffman’s guitar stake out new spaces between piercing punk aggression and amorphous, art-damaged squall. To borrow a pair of songs from their debut, the Nots still make songs out of black mold and white noise—a combustible, crudely rendered fusion of ’60s garage-rock, ’70s post-punk, ’80s hardcore, and ’90s riot grrrl. But where the shout-along chants of We Are Nots were at least hooky enough to not completely scare away the bookers at Memphis morning talk shows, Cosmetic is uninterested in cultivating any crossover territory the band may have been accidentally trod upon the first time around. Like a boxer who’s just taken a gulp of water and had their cuts jellied, the Nots have leapt right back into ring angrier, bloodier, and eager to do more damage.
Where their debut attacked such pointed trash-culture targets as televangelists and psychic talk shows, Cosmetic is fueled by a more existential angst. While she still deals in terse Morse code melodies, Hoffman’s invectives are even more distorted and less decipherable, though song titles like “Inherently Low” and “No Novelty” leave little room for confusion. Melodies rumble and roil like an upset stomach. Before, keyboardist Alexandra Eastburn complemented the band’s trash ‘n’ bash with the standard synth-punk effects of ray-gun zaps and carnivalesque swirls; on Cosmetic, she lurks lower in the mix but her presence is all the more amplified through disorienting drones and queasy oscillations that permeate these songs like a thick fog.
From the all-tension, no-release surge of opener “Blank Reflection” to the creepy, echoing incantations of “Fluorescent Sunset,” Cosmetic conjures the white-knuckled feel of careening down a bumpy backwoods road in the dead of night, Eastburn’s quivering keyboards serving as the lone, flickering headlights. But the Nots’ growing affinity for sonic experimentation never feels at odds with their innate punk-rock primtivism. Rather, Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.
