The Many Reasons to Love Wussy
Wussy have been the best band in America since they released the first of their five superb albums in 2005, only nobody knows it except me and my friends. I'm oversimplifying, of course. Wussy are a moderately big deal in their unhip Cincinnati hometown, and in part because so many of my friends are rock critics, their 2011 Strawberry finished 109th in the 2011 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll -- not bad for a band never once mentioned in Pitchfork. (Ever.) Nevertheless, they remain dishearteningly obscure.
When I say I consider Wussy the best band in America I mean I like or love -- no, make that love or really like -- just about every one of the 46 songs on those five albums: Funeral Dress, followed by Left for Dead, Wussy, the unplugged start-to-finish remake Funeral Dress II, and Strawberry. We're talking Beatles-Stones consistency here. I love the music, always credited to "Wussy"; I love the singing, by frontcouple Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker; and I love the lyrics, by one frontperson or occasionally both. I've seen them live 2008, 2009, and 2012 in a 25 x 100 basement on the Lower East Side called the Cake Shop. All three shows were knockouts, all different; in 2009, after I took my sister along as my date, she dragged her husband to see them again in Brooklyn the next night. Commenters on my Expert Witness blog traveled from as far as New Hampshire and Seattle for Wussy's March 3rd NYC appearance. Yet the 125-capacity venue wasn't quite sold out.
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