06
Streaming Fridays: Le Butcherettes
When a woman walks out on stage wearing an old vintage dress and a blood covered apron, the audience is bound to take notice. When a woman plays a guitar and sings with the force that Teri Gender Bender of the Mexican punk band, Le Butcherettes, does . . . well, then the audience is about to have their brains blown out of their ears.
Le Butcherettes began its life as a female duo, the brainchild of Teri Gender Bender (born Teresa Suarez) and Auryn Jolene. Differences of opinion regarding the band’s direction (isn’t there always?) lead to Jolene’s exit in 2009. Since then, Teri Gender Bender has been the power, the push, and the performance behind Le Butcherettes. A strange brew of punk, vaudevillian cabaret, and the boundless rage of the furies spin out of her songs in a slow reel of sound. The simple, stripped-down guitar inevitably bursts into a Category 5 perfect storm of noise, carrying the listener along in its violent stream.
Like the best of punk, Le Butcherettes’ musicis deceptively simple but hides a more profound expression in both its instrumentation and its lyrics. Songs like “All You See In Me Is Death” or “The Leibniz Language” evoke images of gazes that dismember and the blurred boundaries between lovers’ bodies. The 2011 album, Sin Sin Sin, explores a variety of different kinds of violence: physical, emotinal, and sonic. And it is a violence showcased by Gender Bender’s equally bending vocals as they slide from soft, dulcet near ballad-esque tones to brutal howls and snarls. In some ways reminiscent of Iggy and the Stooges, Le Butcherettes is both sophisticated and vulgar in their version of punk—a glorious, if contradictory, combination.
Despite a turbulent rotation of musicians after Jolene’s departure, Gender Bender has finally found the necessary musical support in the form of drummer Lia Braswell and bassist Omar Rodriquez Lopez of Mars Volta. Sin Sin Sin is the band’s second album and requires several listens in order to fully absorb the sometimes abrupt shift between quiet and riot.