What exactly is a ‘liquid compactor,’ you ask? A hydraulic press? No. A mechanical creature enacting feminist vengeance that lives at the bottom of the ocean? Not quite, but more on that later.
Liquid Compactor is a wonderfully noisy, underwater delight, taking form as the debut LP by all-girl post-punk outfit Penny & the Pits from Saint John (not to be confused with St. John’s.)
Penny & the Pits consists of accomplished artists Penny Stevens, Colleen “Coco” Collins, Grace Stratton, and Meg Yoshida, all profoundly talented women that have amassed impressive musical resumes in their beloved home province of New Brunswick.
The album dropped on June 27, following the band’s inaugural performances at Lawnya Vawnya 15 in St. John’s, a DIY-focused festival. The band also played Sled Island in Calgary, meaning that Liquid Compactor has been heard from coast to coast in its short time since release.
Musical exploration on their first full-length project
“It’s been a good adventure for me because I had never really written lyrics before this project,” Stevens said.
“I think a lot of people kind of grow up writing songs in their bedroom and stuff and I was definitely doing that but it was all like instrumental work. I’d write little tones, or I’d have little lines that I would sing to myself, but I had never really made a song from start to finish. So that process was cool.”
“It was very freeing to be able to write about whatever made sense to me, even musically. Like I write a lot of the music for Motherhood, but there’s a lot of ideas that just don’t fit that aesthetic.”
Stevens’ other project, Motherhood, has a very distinguishable vibe, especially present in their latest release Thunder Perfect Mind, an electric, avant garde punk album that is effectively a Sci-fi concept record with appropriately complex lore to accompany it. Fronted by Stevens, Penny & the Pits take a different – but not subservient! – approach with Liquid Compactor, while still availing of occasional collaborations with Motherhood on some of the songs.
“I set out trying to write like normal pop songs,” said Stevens.
“I’m gonna be normal. I’ll write these four four pop songs, I’m gonna get on the radio, I’m gonna get royalties, I’m gonna retire, you know? And then it’s like, well, no, fuck, I still just made a bunch of weird songs.”
I however, present to prospective listeners the loving argument that weird is good. Weird is fantastic. Liquid Compactor, is weird from an objective standpoint, sure, but it is so exciting musically, and rich with allegory.
The record upends typical riot grrrl elements, creating something unique that describes a macabre feminist utopia within its self-contained, almost-concept-album world.
Liquid Compactor’s conception
“[The album] was inspired by a period of time that was like pretty brutal stuff to live through… So coming out of some sort of traumatic experiences, the way that I was coping besides therapy was swimming,” Stevens explained.
“There’s an old Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in downtown Fredericton and it’s really tourist-y but in the pandemic there was no one there, so I got a membership to their gym which is like one treadmill, one elliptical and a pool and I was swimming every day. And most of time there’d be no one else in there so I was just completely alone, letting everything happen in my brain.”
“That was where I started dreaming up some of these concepts about…the impact of water on the body and the mind,” she said.
“I was feeling like, as I was swimming, that some of the things that were too big for my brain and my heart were becoming manageable. And it felt like the water was sort of like applying pressure, some sort of… external source that was able to take things that I couldn’t bear and make them manageable.”
A ‘compactor,’ usually describes some type of mechanism that applies pressure, crushing waste material, allowing it to become smaller for easier disposal. For Stevens, this is not a sentiment of blind self-destruction, but intensive emotional labor.
“The concept of this liquid compactor … something like a trash compactor, or I kept picturing cars that are getting like squished down. I was feeling like those junked cars … junked ideas and concepts and self-perceptions that didn’t serve me anymore were sort of becoming … and I could then relocate them and use them to build something new.”
Vengeance, fantasy, and feminist sea monsters
Many songs on Liquid Compactor explore delightfully morbid fantasies of revenge, turning the misguided actions of predatory men back around on them, giving abusers a taste of their own revolting medicine as a manner of self-empowerment.
Most notably, the song ‘Sweat,’ distributed as the final single in preparation for the album’s release, details a tumultuous night wherein the speaker cautiously stalks a man, following him home from the bar, precise with every action, taunting him, trying to make him ‘sweat,’ flipping the script and instilling the striking anxiety that women often feel when treated as prey.
The song ends with a breakdown wailing out phrases commonly said by abusers to evade to consequences for their actions. “WHAT CAN I SAY? I’LL SAY WHATEVER GETS IT DROPPED/’TROUBLED’, SURE ‘GOING THROUGH SOMETHING’/’MY REPUTATION!'”
“These general ideas about liquid compaction were coming in and then I started visualizing this thing as like a monster,” the musician remarked.
“Where … I didn’t have to feed my trauma, I could also feed those that caused the trauma per se. So then I started sort of imagining this world in which me and my girls were able to exact revenge on us that really deserved it.”
“So it became sort of like a fantasy, a little daydreaming when I was swimming. … There’s one skylight above that pool. I would just stare through the skylight … just have this little fantasy world.”
Dutifully sticking with the water theme, Penny & the Pits offer a robust commentary on the intricacies of dealing with trauma, debating good and evil through their vivid lyrical imagery.
“There’s definitely ways in which the water can be a force for good or for evil, right?” Stevens said, a relatable notion to other imaginative coast-dwellers.
“And the lower you go, the more pressure you feel. So kind of picturing like, the further down you go in whatever, in your grief and feeling that pressure and getting to the bottom … and finding this machine that’s like, ‘don’t worry, I got you.’”
“Going into this process, I wasn’t sure how it was gonna feel, especially because some of the subject matter is sort of heavy and intense for me,” said Stevens.
Penny & the Pits are nicely settling into their success following the album’s release and comfortable familiarity with one another as an all femme-fronted group, deservedly resting up after a whirlwind stint of debut shows for Liquid Compactor. I can say with utter certainty that I am excited to see what comes next for them.
Listen to Liquid Compactor here.
