Staff Reviews

Chastity Belt - I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone

Review by Joe Goggins

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Chastity Belt’s second full-length for Hardly Art. Produced and mixed by Matthew Simms of Wire.
I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is their third and finest full-length to date. Recorded live in July of 2016, at Jackpot! in Portland, Oregon (birthplace of some of their favorite Elliott Smith records), it’s a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of moody post-punk that finds the Seattle outfit’s feelings in full view, unobscured by humour. There is no irony in its title: Before she had Chastity Belt, and the close relationships that she does now, Shapiro considered herself a career loner.This is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish (This Time of Night) to shimmering insight (Different Now) to gauzy ambiguity (Stuck, written and sung by Grimm). It’s a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Shapiro shares early on its staggering title track: “I wanna be sincere.”
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