SOUNDTRACK: EATING OUT-Burn 7″ (2013).
Orville Peck has been getting a lot of attention lately. In his act, he is a masked cowboy and his identity was (for a time) unknown.
It was fairly recently revealed that Orville Peck is actually Canadian musician Daniel Pitout (those tattoos will always give it away).
Pitout is in a couple of bands including Eating Out and Nü Sensae.
Eating Out plays a noisy grunge. They have a bunch of one-song singles on bandcamp and this 7″ collects three of them.
Pitout is the singer (and he sounds NOTHING like Orville Peck). I’ve felt like Orville Peck is a joke character because of the insane way he sings. Hearing this, I’m evening more convinced of it. But I’m glad he’s in on it.
“Burn” opens with a clean guitar intro followed by the biggest most distorted guitar around. It’s certainly grunge and not metal and it runs through the verse and chorus. The middle reintroduces the opening guitar riff and then the big distortion returns. The song ends with that same clean guitar–it’s reall catchy–before crashing to a conclusion.
“Come Around” has two lead guitars (nicely fuzzed out) and a big fuzzy sound. The sound reminds me of an updated version of SST bands.
“That’s My Man” closes the 7″ with a quiet intro. Echoed vocals and a simple guitar melody. It’s a poppy, almost do-wop melody with a bit of reverb drenched over the whole thing. The song doesn’t change much, it just gets bigger as it goes along. It’s probably the least interesting of the three, but it certainly shows Pitout looking to stretch beyond punk and grunge way back in 2013.
[READ: September 2, 2019] “To-Do”
This is a story about feminism, sex, and a woman’s relationship with her mother.
Constance is in front of a crowd of women at Antler’s Bar for Storytelling Wednesday.
She is telling them that her mother had been a beauty. She had gotten a degree and was successful in a typing pool in New York City. Although her boss told her that she had to cut her long hair and adopt the stylish updo of the time. When she refused, her boss called her hysterical. I can imagine her telling the audience: Do you know the origin of the word hysterical is the belief that the uterus could reach up through the body and and grip the throat.
The women in the audience seem agitated and bored. Constance tries to win them over by reciting her mother’s to-do list, something she found in her mother’s effects after she died.
She tries to convince them of the significance of post its and to do lists in a woman’s life.
None of the women see it.
A few performers later, Beth, Constance’s colleague, takes the stage. Her medium is essentially visual. She stands there bare-chested with spoons balancing on her nipples. When a spoon crashes to the floor, the crowd collectively gasps.
Constance calls for a drink while Beth is roundly applauded. When Beth gets to her seat next to Constance, (shirt mercifully buttoned) Constance raves about her and asked how she does it. Beth replied “Muscle memories. Tim thinks it’s a hoot.”
The night was meant to be about inhibition: losing it, gaining it, reclaiming it, owning it. The woman who organized the night talked about her Cesarean section and how she still felt the doctor’s hands deep inside her even now.
A flashback to 1980 shows Constance and her mother. Constance returns from tennis to fin her mother passed out on the couch.
As she puts her mother to bed, the bell rings. It’s her mother’s bridge club. Constance volunteers to play and the women appreciate her for it. When her mother wakes up, she asks what she missed.
Constance replies automatically, “Nothing.”
After the bar, Constance gets to her apartment only to find out she does not have her key. There have always been stickers all over the mailboxes for Phil’s locksmith. She was sick of seeing them until now, when they come in handy.
Phil arrives and is surprisingly hot. Constance remembers back to a friend in college who invited the UPS guy upstairs. When Phil unlocks her door, she asks if he would like a drink.
A few hours later she finds herself naked from the waist up balancing spoons on her nipples. Phil says he’ll have to teach his wife how to do it.
When Constance thinks back about her success on the tennis court, she thinks of defeating Macy Levitt in straight sets. and Macy’s reaction. Macy was devastated, never thinking Constance was that good (could it possibly have been the same Constance on the court?). Constance even wonders, when Macy harmed herself years later, if that defeat had anything to do with it. (That’s a nice detail).
All of this mother-thinking dates back to a a specific incident, something Constance doesn’t like to think about but can never forget.
Leave a Reply