YOU’VE GOT TO NOT FADE AWAY
LINE UP FOR THE ASCENSION DAY
Love, these days, can feel like a subscription model: overpriced, full of hidden fees, and somehow still sold as self-care. Everybody is performing okay-ness while the world keeps glitching, smiling through layoffs, soft-launch heartbreak, and relationships that, frankly, suck. Underneath the bitterness, though, there is still a sharp instinct for self-preservation: read the fine print, clock the manipulation, stop mistaking anxiety for chemistry. In a culture where tenderness gets monetized and safety feels provisional, discernment starts to look sexy. Survival is no fairytale, but it does have standards, and they should be higher than this.
Positronix comes barging in from the City of Brotherly Love with Miss Universe, a five-song EP that feels like somebody spiked the office coffee with amphetamines, tabloid clippings, and old college radio singles, then shoved the whole mess down a stairwell lined with funhouse mirrors. The band has a knack for taking styles that ought to sit across the room from each other, medieval pageantry and future-shocked post-punk, cheap glamour and class anger, and making them scrap in public until something weirdly glorious crawls out of the pile.
The lead single Ascension Day is a standout bruiser, a pop song with its lipstick smeared and its earrings torn loose in the alley. The vocal harmonies bring to mind Kim Deal’s casual magic. Around them, rollicking guitars and echo-streaked keys keep everything pitching forward, while the lead delivery swings between shout and sneer and some slyer, lilting turns that make the satire bite harder. Lyrically, the song sinks its teeth into a world where love gets brokered like a deal, where beauty is managed by creeps in suits, and where the working class are expected to grin while standing in line for one more public humiliation.
The guitars move fast and cut crooked, tossing off hook willy nilly, while the synths hover around the edges. The song is compact, yet the ideas never feel pinched. Somewhere in the middle of all this, you get these tasty little guitar figures that carry a straight-up 90s college rock charge, and the whole record gets a jolt of scrappy, caffeinated life. You can hear traces of their earlier full-length in the song’s bones; a bent blend of Siouxsie severity, DEVO twitch, and the bright, bruised snap of The Muffs, but these new tracks hit with a sharper elbow and a menacing grin.
Listen to Ascension Day below and purchase the single here:
Beneath the pageant rot, the cheap smiles, the band’s Philly scrappiness, and the compromised romance, you get a track full of warning and wit – one that keeps its eye on who is being bought, who is being used, and who might finally grab the axe. Ascension Day is funny, furious, catchy as hell, and smart enough to know that revolt sometimes arrives dressed for the prom.
Catch POSITRONIX live!
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Apr 10 Rhizome DC Washington, DC
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