LA garage rockers Bleached released one of my favorite albums last year — Welcome the Worms. Their EP follow-up to that record is equally strong, and it’s now available to listen to in full.
Can You Deal? features four really strong tracks, leading with a killer title track and then the most recent single “Flipside” as its strengths. As we noted previously, the latter sounded like it would have fit perfectly on the soundtrack of a late ’90s teen comedy. The EP will be available via the Dead Oceans label that has released Bleached’s material previously.
Singer and guitarist Jennifer Clavin explained the inspiration for the material on the EP in a press release:
“I create music and art because I need to. To express, to bond, to reconcile, and to connect. And to use my voice. To have it received with such a generic labeling as “girl band” and consistently referenced as “female fronted” is insulting and reductive. The title track to this EP, “Can You Deal?” is about this experience. Last year we released a deeply personal full length album titled Welcome The Worms. It was a record about being in an emotionally abusive relationship. It was a record about getting spun out on drugs and alcohol. It was a record about totally losing myself in order to find myself. It was also our most ambitious body of work yet, with guitar work and guitar sounds and production we had only dreamed of until then. And yet to this day I am still fielding interview questions that have more to do with my gender than with the art I am creating. Somehow the conversation usually derails into some variation of the following question: “What is it like to be a girl in a rock band?”. And the ensuing story will define us based on our sex. Why is gender pointed out in nearly all coverage of our band? Labeling me as a woman in a band just puts me in a box, and doesn’t allow everything else I am to be seen and heard. It’s 2017, Can You Deal with women playing rock and roll yet?”
You can listen to the full EP via Spotify below. If you’re in Los Angeles, make sure you catch Bleached at the Echoplex on Thursday, April 6. I’ve already got my ticket! The show also features rising L.A. punk band The Regrettes and The Side Eyes. Tickets are priced at $16.50 and are available now.
Along with the album dropping is the music video for “Can You Deal?” — which you can watch below:
