QUASI

Breaking The Balls Of History (Sub Pop)

When Quasi’s Janet Weiss left Sleater-Kinney, some of us went into mourning. But one of contemporary rock‘n’roll’s finest drummers knows from experience that breakups need not be the end. After all, her marriage to Sam Coomes may have wound up in divorce in 1995, but here she is, 28 years later, still making music with him as Quasi for latest album, Breaking The Balls Of History.

What to do when your world is turned upside down – by national political turmoil, a global pandemic and (in Weiss’ case) that split and a nasty car crash? Quasi sought comfort in the familiar: playing together.

The duo’s first LP for a decade finds them with a finger on the pulse of “Uncle Sam, sick old man”, as Riots & Jokes has it. Anger, frustration, cabin fever, a sense of being in limbo, a feeling of “shouting into the void”: they’re all here, not least in a trio of tracks called Doomscrollers, Inbetweenness and Nowheresville. But, in the face of it all, Quasi remain defiant. If this fuzzy, joyous album is indeed “a last long laugh at the edge of death”, then it’s been a blast.

words BEN WOOLHEAD