All that hopey-changey stuff isn't quite working out for Katie Alice Greer. "Barack Obama killed something in me," Greer screams at the tail end of Bodies and Control and Money and Power, the latest release from D.C. rabblerousers Priests, "and I'm gonna get him for it." Global effective tax rates, security-state paranoia, post-millennial malaise, and a certain modernist furniture outlet: they all get theirs on Bodies. Every anxiety-ridden, admonishment-flinging second of Bodies finds Priests—Greer, drummer Daniele Daniele, guitarist G.L. Jaguar, and bassist Taylor Mulitz—all revved up and ready to go: for them, settling down's just as bad as giving up. As Greer insists on opener "Design Within Reach", if you're "facing fear only when you have to," well, you just made the list.
Bodies—which follows two small-batch cassettes and a 7" on the band's own Sister Polygon imprint—may be Priests' big coming-out party, but it's hardly their first time at the rally. You might know Greer from punk hero Ian Svenonius' Chain and the Gang, while Jaguar's been a staple of the DC underground since his teenage years, volunteering at storied District hotspot Fort Reno. After launching Priests in 2012, they quickly made a name for themselves on the back of their fiery live shows. Even on record, it's not hard to see the appeal; they're a restless bunch, largely unconcerned with polish, careening fitfully from one provocation to the next. Jaguar's deranged-surfer anti-riffs and Mulitz's corkscrewing basslines chase each other like junkyard dogs, never letting each other out of their sights for very long. Daniele's deeply innate drumwork is the cool-headed counterpoint to her bandmates' writhing and reeling. And Greer, well, Greer is just something else altogether; whether she's doling out castigations or on the verge of a crack-up, she's an impossibly commanding presence, splitting the difference between control and chaos.
Sure, their music—which triangulates turn-of-the-80s Los Angeles, early 90s Olympia, and NYC b-movie-obsessives the Cramps, if that band spent a little less time at the drive-in and a little more time cataloging the horrors on 6 o'clock news—isn't likely to win them many points for originality, or for that matter, subtlety. But, from the first blast of feedback to the flirtation with light treason that closes it out, Bodies doesn't let up for a second; at just 17-and-a-half minutes, it has neither the time nor the patience for fucking around.
While promising enough, Priests' pre-Bodies releases too often seemed resigned to simple sloganeering, to placing message above medium. Songs about the pernicious influence of television, product placement, and, er, Lana Del Rey hit soft targets at full force; their passion was never in doubt, but for every point they landed, two more seemed pulled from the pages of a dog-eared Punk 101 textbook. At its best, Bodies atomizes that early furor, a powerful weapon to train on a more deserving set of targets. On "Powertrip," Greer rails against the confluence of authority and condescension; on "Design Within Reach," she's reminding us how often creature comforts place a wedge between the haves from the have-nots. "Right Wing" reels off a laundry list of invasive police-state maneuvers; "Modern Love/No Weapon" lifts lines from punk progenitor Jonathan Richman and image poet Diane Wakoski as a way of outlining its "plans to disrupt."