Wet Dip – Smell of Money - New LP

Wet Dip is: Daniel Doyle- guitar/bass Erica Rodriguez- drums Sylvia Rodriguez- vocals/bass/guitar

Feel It Records sure knows how to find them…”rollercoaster” jumpstarts the proceedings on this one by Wet Dip, giving us the hectic chaotic jarring side of the amusement park ride, when you hold on for your life and want to get off, coming across literal but you can do with it what you like, literal can still be symbolic, I could compare it to a few things, even life itself, living life is scary enough to want to jump off, but you hold on and ride it out...people next to you laughing, letting go and putting their hands in the air, but you clench your teeth and close your eyes, get a grip on to that bar like a soldier gripping her rifle, holding on for dear life.  This may be placed at the beginning for good reason, maybe to both pull you into the nightmare and at the same time telling you to not to take this all too serious, perhaps a good message to start it out when some of this seems to end up rather serious...of course while nightmares are awful, you wake up...carnival rides can be terrifying, but before too long, they are over and you climb out and you look back and maybe even laugh...It's also a good place to start this album because a good part of this is like a rollercoaster ride, an old wooden one that rattles like a snake, this album going to off into different directions, headlong into the no wave and picking up pieces of sounds from so many places like the most adventurous underground music of the past 50 years and stabbing it all into the heart of Texas.  Somehow, they manage to fit the two covers into the presentation as if they were written to belong here.  Both are amazing (Pixies "Silver" and Gloria Trevi’s “Pelo Suelto”) and the songs help you realize that the vocals are a big part of why this set has so much to offer...and so much range covered. the set is so noisy, but through the noise, Sylvia Rodriguez's vocals help guide the proceedings, alternating between Spanish and English.  By the time we get to "Kill Floor," the abrasive has risen to dominate the sound, the song probably about the kill floor of a slaughter house, or so I assume, where the "smell of shit" is the "smell of money."  Anyway, if you seek out the oddball and adventurous, reach out and get your hands on this one.  This one is a stun gun. -- winch

   

Just when you think that Feel It Records couldn’t possibly have any more surprises up their sleeves this year, they’ve unleashed the debut album from an exciting, classic Texas weirdo punk band. Wet Dip are an Austin-based trio whose roots stretch back to the Lone Star State’s northern panhandle, where sisters Sylvia Rodriguez (vocals/guitar) and Erica Rodriguez (drums) grew up before moving to the state capital and meeting Daniel Doyle (bass/guitar). After releasing a demo EP in 2019, the Rodriguezes and Doyle met up with another garage punk/post-punk band that’s been terrorizing the Great Plains as of late in Sweeping Promises and recorded Smell of Money, their first album, at Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug’s Lawrence, Kansas studio. The first full-length statement from Wet Dip is another entry in a long lineage of hot-to-the-touch Texas oddball rock and roll, but it’s not constrained to even that large of a state line–shades of vintage New York no wave, Pixies/Breeders (they cover the former band’s “Silver”), and even the punkier side of Deerhoof all color Smell of Money. Like any good no wave band, the elements of Wet Dip’s sound on Smell of Money can be counted on one hand, all serve different functions, and all come together to form a unique torrent. The rhythm section always has one foot on the gas pedal, the cacophonous guitar drops in and out, causing destruction and chaos anywhere it makes landfall, and Sylvia’s vocals (which range from flat post-punker to seething conversationalist to damaged crooner) are equally remarkable. Rodriguez conveys rage in a much more interesting way than your typical one-note punk frontman–her lyrics in the English-language songs here (“Black Friday” and “Emperor” particularly) are delivered in a fascinatingly nervous yet furious fashion, and her increasingly frantic repetition of the title line in the closing title track is the final ingredient in a piece of fiery industrial punk horror. Of the album’s two covers, it’s notable that Wet Dip turn the Pixies song into a desert noise-ballad with what’s probably Sylvia’s most melodic vocal, and it’s their version of Gloria Trevi’s “Pelo Suelto” that they turn into a basement no-wave garage-stomp. Wet Dip’s Spanish-language originals are no less effective either, particularly the western-surf experiment of “Stray” acquitting itself quite nicely in the record’s number two slot. Some moments on Smell of Money are more noisy than others, but absolutely none of them are boring.