Priests "Bodies And Control And Money And Power" LP (2014)

While promising enough, Priests' pre-Bodies releases too often seemed resigned to simple sloganeering, to placing message above medium. Songs about the pernicious influence of television, product placement, and, er, Lana Del Rey hit soft targets at full force; their passion was never in doubt, but for every point they landed, two more seemed pulled from the pages of a dog-eared Punk 101 textbook. At its best, Bodies atomizes that early furor, a powerful weapon to train on a more deserving set of targets. On "Powertrip," Greer rails against the confluence of authority and condescension; on "Design Within Reach," she's reminding us how often creature comforts place a wedge between the haves from the have-nots. "Right Wing" reels off a laundry list of invasive police-state maneuvers; "Modern Love/No Weapon" lifts lines from punk progenitor Jonathan Richman and image poet Diane Wakoski as a way of outlining its "plans to disrupt."

It'd be reductive to pigeonhole Priests as merely a political act, because things are never quite that cut-and-dry. "When you are just a kid you want everything to be new," Greer recalls on "New", "but you go into an old house, and everything is so scary." You can take "New" as a charred childhood memory or a quick-take comment on our disposable culture; for Priests, the personal and the political are always within shouting distance, but Greer's more explicit commentary is often placed alongside lines that leave quite a bit more to the imagination. Politics are front-and-center on the unusually poppy "Right Wing", which kicks off with purse searches and pep rallies. Still, by the song's end, Greer's insisting "I'm not trying to be anything." Closer "And Breeding" touches on post-Y2K unease and Obama-era disenfranchisement, but its first few lines imagine an Elmer's-huffing teen scribbling something about "monkeys and robots, monkey and robots" in the folds of a math ledger.

Does Greer contradict herself? Sure, maybe, and there are times when it seems she's throwing just about everything at the wall in the hopes that some of it'll stick. But political lyrics—or any lyrics, really—need not be coherent to hit home; they've just got to be compelling. Greer occasionally treads over well-worn territory; sometimes she seems to sling her lyrical Molotovs at anything that isn't bolted down. And there are plenty of moments where Greer seems almost pressed for time; the onslaught of interviews Priests have given in the run-up to Bodies illuminate many of the EP's less readily apparent messages, but without that extratextual support, portions of Bodies remain open to interpretation, and some of its more implicit messages occasionally get a bit lost in the shuffle. "We don’t have a thesis statement for our band,” Greer told the Washington Post last month. “We’re still figuring out what we’re trying to say, so if it’s nuanced and confusing to people, that’s cool. It’s nuanced and confusing to us, too.”

Priests are still a relatively new band, with just a few releases to their name; even counting Bodies, their total recorded output clocks in just about an hour. Given their relatively slim output and their occasional difficulty honing in on their targets, it seems like they've still got a couple of kinks to work out. Still, the brash, unflinching Priests just feel necessary; they're just as angry—and perplexed—about the state of things as any of their peers, but unlike those who'd rather retreat into apathy, they refuse to just lie down and take it." - Paul Thompson, Pitchfork