The Submissives Live At Value Sound Studios

Having listened to three records by Deb Edison’s analytically invaluable project The Submissives, I’m more inclined to hear them as The Subversives. Their monotony rubs clear through to obsession, toppy subs who demand the same amount of attention they’re paying to their unnamed paramours, only to brush it off once received. The dynamic at play is more OnlyFans than Bandcamp. While this plays on its face as re-recordings from her Do You Really Love Me? tape and interim tracks that drifted away before her 2022 comeback Wanna Be Your Thing, the full band brought out here opens up these songs more effectively as the deceptive traps they are. Everyone’s wearing the red dress, singing in pitch-separated unison, innocence fully cast away, waiting for you to give in or chew your own leg off to get away. It’s a withering amount of attention, impossible to predict and fully in control. It’s also not something anyone really ever pulled off this well as a musical project, and the Shaggs-meets-Seven Sistersness of it all gives it that private press feel that’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. I wonder who has time for this kind of all-consuming relationship, then I realize that’s something left for the world outside of here, described in worrying detail and fictionalized to supremely unnerving effect. Really one of the great projects of the last 10 years or so, and they’ve never sounded better."—Doug Mosurock