Short Sighted Security, Shaylee's 2022 Kill Rock Stars debut (and third overall album), is about women who are just 127% in it. Its twelve songs are an intense expression of what it feels like to finally have done the impossible thing and then watching as your old life dismantles itself while you're trying to put the load-bearing structures of the new one in place.
Or, at least, that's what it felt like when I first heard Elle Archer, Robin Cook, and Nate Anderson perform these songs in the summer of 2023. Their lyrics mirrored a tremendous amount of what I was going through. There was a part of me that was embarrassed to be a forty-eight-year-old woman finding common cause with someone twenty years younger -- but adult transition tends to be a leveling experience.
With The Name of this Band is Shaylee Archer returns to this emotional landscape one last time. Musically, she's unimpeachable. This fourth release shows her continuing to mature as a producer, bouncing from bossa novas to psychedelic soundscapes with an ease that comes from spending half her life as a performing musician.
Thematically though is where Shaylee has always hit me in the heart. Archer reengages with the same themes she explored in her last album, but this time there's a dollop of something extra. Hope.
Short Sighted Security had moments of intense bleak truths -- the bridge of the stand-out track The World Changes Around Us still regularly haunts corners of my soul.
There's no love left in this world
And it makes itself known, and It dies with every step
It's wretched and abused and It's tired and it's sad
But what can we do? What can we do? What can we do?
What can we do? What can we do?
The women in The Name of this Band is Shaylee are starting to figure out not just what they can do, but what it is they need to do. The tone is set early with the anthemic hook of Stoned Poet and carries through the rest of the album. The universal feelings of queer rock and roll are still there -- love, longing, ambition, loss -- but rather than wallow in those feelings most of the songs allow these women a path forward to growth. Or perhaps, I am, like a teenager, once again projecting hopes for my own future life onto the music I'm listening to. But hope's in short supply these days so I'll take it where I can get it.
I was sad when I heard that Archer was moving on from Shaylee. I've intuited that there are myriad reasons for this -- none of which are really our business, and most of which are boring.
Hagiographly though -- it's hard not to see an inevitability to a band like Shaylee fading into the background. We all get tired of making the same mistakes and, given time, transition finally gives us a chance to start making better ones.
Shaylee is playing a one-off album release show at Lollipop Shoppe on November 15th at 8:30 pm