ALBUM REVIEW: Amy Rose Mills – ‘i think we’ve met before’

Every fan on the heavier side of the music spectrum has been recounted with familiar icks from non-heavy listeners. “It’s just screaming”, “it’s just noise”, “it’s ugly and I can’t dance to it”, etc. All of those things are true to be fair, yet owe more to the music’s unique identity, and its emphasis on an intangible catharsis many just don’t get. So imagine if they ever heard Couch Slut, the primary vehicle for Amy Rose Mills’ vigorous guitar-led brain.

You can be well versed in ‘90s death metal, slam, goregrind, whatever, but Couch Slut is about as abyssal as music gets. They’re fantastic, for the record, and Mills’ sometimes rollicking, sometimes sludgy soundtrack is a fantastic facilitator for the band’s warped semi-autobiographical horror tales. Mills also plays in Adult Human Females—a band showcasing trans visibility through harsh noise—and even dabbles in an experimental, nearly calming slowcore sound in her solo side project. i think we’ve met before is a beautiful and assured avant-garde bedroom guitar record, driven by Mills’ passion for the instrument, thoughtful lyricism, and collaboration.

i heard you call my name is the full suite’s defining statement: the power of strings. Whether there’s nylon acoustic rumbles or intensifying violins that subdue and shriek across its course, Mills’ sound design is meticulous in balancing hazy noise rock we usually hear from her, and its antithetical balm. catch us quick manages to layer a cluster of arpeggiated chords, natural harmonics, horns, and those strings again without being clustered. And as a duet with Couch Slut’s drummer Theo Nobel, the track sounds like South London experimental indie band caroline, only with two members rather than eight. Finale wednesday july 9th at 3:33 AM also channels that band’s energy, a bloody lovely repeated motif rounding out Mills’ panache on the guitar. She happens to be a luthier in Brooklyn, which makes all the sense in the world, really.

There’s plenty of shorter, weirder ideas going on: the “burn quick, I didn’t start the fire” melodrama across the gentle i have a crush on you; Godspeed-style field recording collages on 222; spoken word draped over the loosy-goosy riffs and (rare) drums and bell-chime sounds on it’s raining again and i’m sick in bed. The album’s strangest moment, animal sounds.wav, does as is advertised, featuring a list of animals that Mills and guest Anya Good like, chuckling all the way before mooing and clucking to herald a fully fleshed-out track from nowhere. I, for one, honestly cackle at the closing “baaah”s each time, realising how well it all works as the outsider folk idea it must have started as.

The record’s most concrete songs are interspersed throughout the tracklist. a little treat expertly flips an anticipatory fun venture into something far darker—“Sometimes I’ll go to the store at two in the morning and buy a little treat / Sometimes I’ll take a nap in the evening and wake up feeling fucked up”—with fuzzy basslines, background screaming and warped “getting high” guitar effects adding to the atmosphere changes when they occur. Small drum appearances reoccur on maybe i’ll see you in a year or 2 which adds a condensed interval of clanking cymbals (and whatever other items, tools, instruments, are thrown in the mix, it’s hard to tell.)

idumea is Mills’ own interpretation of the folk hymn similarly adapted by Current 93 (whose frontman gets a shoutout in david tibet blocked me on instagram). It is suitably bluesy and doomy, moving on from an acapella that encourages the sparing use of other instruments. It underscores this entire endeavour: the sharp use of traditional instruments made bolshier and stranger, all from the mind of a musician keen to tinker with guitar music and warp it into something new. We all need a breather from the chaos of bands like Couch Slut and their terrifying contemporaries sometimes. In an on-brand darkly comedic way, it’s funny that it’s their own guitarist that provides it.

For fans of: Emma Ruth Rundle, caroline, Grouper

‘i think we’ve met before’ by Amy Rose Mills is released on 26th June.

Words by Elliot Burr