Clickbait At Your Leisure LP
At Your Leisure is the debut record from Chicago’s CLICKBAIT, a self-contained minimal DIY disco dance party to heat up even the chilliest Midwestern basement. These thirteen songs are all unwavering testaments to rhythm, propelled by roundabout, ESG-descended bass lines and four-on-the-floor, hi-hat-rattling beats, with sparse shocks of single-note guitar dropping in judiciously alongside equally concise lyrical missives from vocalist Sandra, whose matter-of-fact deadpan delivery periodically slips into more animated shrieks. The neo-no-wave needling of “Audacity” leaves plenty of negative space for posing rhetorical questions (“What do I want? / Do I need it?”), while the GAUCHE-like “So-So” digs deep into a perpetual motion groove as Sandra’s coolly detached speak-sing gets increasingly intense, ultimately breaking into a pointed, impassioned wail (“Being a woman is not a competition / That I want to play in”). The dry, frills-free recording imparts the LP with a certain out-of-time feeling, like listening to a years-weathered cassette capture of a clandestine PYLON rehearsal in the studio art building of a state college circa 1980—there’s a scribbled precariousness and sense of spontaneity in CLICKBAIT’s wound-up sound that’s particularly refreshing in a modern world of BODEGAs and GUSTAFs sanitizing this sort of funky art-punk for IPA-drinkers at gentrifying rock clubs; bless them for that.