“Don’t wanna be a bossy bottom!”
This line from the song “Bow Tie Eater” made me cackle during my first listen to Geneva Jacuzzi’s new album Triple Fire, released by Dais Records. It wasn’t just the reference to a power-tripping sub or the welcome shock of needy “Give me love” desire and in-heat grooves after songs of ice, untouchability, and luxury problems. Take the previous track, “Rock and a Hard Place,” with its rampant record scratches and 8-bit abrasiveness (or at least as abrasive as Triple Fire gets), which concludes with Jacuzzi ominously threatening in a deceptively sing-songy croon, “When will you ever learn? Play with fire you’ll get burned.” After that, who couldn’t use the ecstatic eruption of “Bow Tie Eater” with its “synth chop” comfort and the pleasurable release of a “Reiki handjob”? However, what really made me giggle with glee at “Bow Tie Eater” was Jacuzzi’s pitch-perfectly flirtatious delivery of this not-so-sneaky innuendo—so mischievous and strutting that it should be placed alongside The B-52s’ rear-end road trip, “Dirty Back Road,” in the canon of delightfully camp filth anthems. And with the pay-off at the end of the chorus, “Nobody likes a bossy bottom…unless it’s ME,” “Bow Tie Eater” is a theme song for bossy bottoms everywhere!
I bring up The B-52s so early as those neon bee-hived and be-wigged new-wave icons haunt Triple Fire. Beginning immediately with the twinkling synth sparklies that open the album with “Laps of Luxury,” Triple Fire provides much-needed justice for those of us who have long-appreciated The B-52s’ lesser-loved 1983 album Whammy!. Whammy! marked the period when the band crash-landed into their perhaps too synth-and-drum machine-reliant 1980s Earth-bound sound from their prior incarnation as futuristic invaders from Planet Claire. The album is unmistakably and quite possibly detrimentally of its time, but I still maintain, with classics like “Legal Tender,” “Song for a Future Generation,” and “Whammy Kiss,” it gets unfair short shrift in the band’s catalog. Triple Fire resurrects and updates this sound rather than attempting to voyage to the more popular 53 miles west of Venus. So much so that many of the tracks could be seamlessly wedged into Whammy!: the dreamily desperate “Scene Ballerina” fits comfortably next to the gambling addict “Queen of Las Vegas” and the janky beat of “Heart Full of Poison” could be shoved in the middle of the zippy “Moon 83” and squawking “Big Bird.” Whereas Whammy!’s downfall was its inability to transcend its era, Triple Fire is deliberately, stubbornly, thrillingly retro, a joyously twirling nostalgic dance party that could easily be slipped into those much-missed late-stage Pyramid Club 1980s nights between Company B, Laura Branigan, Depeche Mode, and early Madonna without detection.
Much of this has to do with Jacuzzi’s singular synth prowess. I mean, can you hear synths without thinking of the 1980s? Impossible. The synth has been a staple of Jacuzzi’s music since her earliest lo-fi bedroom closet recordings in the mid-aughts, most of which made the cut for her first full-length album, 2010’s Lamaze. Since then, Jacuzzi has been on a journey of continually increasing professional slickness. Triple Fire marks the sleekest production of her output so far, unseating her last album, 2016’s Technophelia, which previously held that designation. Most noticeably, Triple Fire abandons all those Halloween haunted house sound effects and trumpeting elephants and other animal noises heard on Technophelia. The lyrics on the new album are also less fantastically zany. There are no cannibals, giant beasts in the sea, a plague-carrying arc of the zombies, or lepers in the hut here. In fact, the subject matter of many of Triple Fire’s songs is, dare I say, quite normal pop song fare. This includes bad romances such as the post-breakup “You’ll be running back into my arms” defiance in the rocking “Speed of Light” or “Dry,” which narrates the aching anxiety (“Just set and forget it! I know you’re gonna hang me out to dry”) of waiting for a phone call.
Even still, Jacuzzi adds dashes of bizarro imagery through the songs such as the tidal wave of tears that crashes down on the protagonist in “Dry.” These wacko evocations, buried under shimmery pop gloss, simply require a closer listen to uncover. Behind the funky Xerox machine beat of “Nu2U,” Jacuzzi croaks this surreal suggestion, “Did something crawl up the ocean floor and walk through my door?” before comically answering with a blasé, “It’s true I’ve seen it all before.” The glittering “Take it or Leave it” at first sounds tailor-made for a prom scene from a John Hughes film. But, on a closer listen, the song is a foreboding tale of civilizational destruction. Alcatraz tumbles into the sea, London Bridge might fall down yet again, spires burn in the sky (mimicking the flames on the album’s cover), an angel of death offers, “Take it or leave it,” and Jacuzzi gets electrocuted by a mic. Perhaps the latter explains these Blakeian visions…
Like the jarring juxtaposition of apocalyptic premonitions and sonic saccharineness, Triple Fire is also steeped in layers of irony. Nowhere is the irony more apparent than in the songs satirizing the problems of the uber-wealthy or, conversely, pathetic social climbers. With the demand, “Driver, window down. I have a tale to tell,” the album’s opener, “Laps of Luxury,” is an extended whine delivered from the back of a chauffeured car with the repeated revelation: “I’ve seen so many things no one should ever see, on the laps of luxury.” As the limo rider unburdens herself, the later “Scene Ballerina” is an ode to every spotlight-grabbing, attention hog who takes all the air out of the party (“Running to the spotlight, through the center of the beam. Posing in the mirror. Shout for all to hear her”). The corresponding music video directed by Thalia Mavros sees Jacuzzi embodying this character: yanking her face in perma-surprised, thread-lifted place before repeatedly trying to impress an exhausted crowd, who have clearly seen this act before as they roll their eyes and sigh deeply behind her back. We’ve all known this person and, as a longtime Los Angeles resident, I’m sure Jacuzzi has too. In taking on the characters of the wealthy and their wannabes, there is a small but not insignificant resonance here with Lady Gaga’s The Fame when she was singing about paparazzi and money honeys long before anyone gave a shit.
Like Gaga’s debut, it’s sometimes hard to know exactly how seriously to take Jacuzzi. The best example is “Art is Dangerous,” which I can imagine Gaga delivering with utmost sincerity (Hello, ARTPOP!). The song begins with an incantation about ART, a choice that already makes my eyes twitch:
“Art is dangerous
Art is meaningless
Art is serious
Hang it on the wall”
As the song continues, in between mocking, fierce clichés (“All is fair in love and war”) and chanted confrontation (“Who gave you the right to talk down to me?”), Jacuzzi further articulates exactly what art is: mysterious, immaculate, derelict, scandalous….All of these things may be true, but is there anything lamer than singing about art? (Ok, other than theorizing about art). Yet, Jacuzzi doesn’t seem unaware of this. Instead, defiantly, she’s leaping headfirst into the vat of cheese. This, along with the song’s infectious deadpan Gina X Performance swagger, is what saves it from overwhelming the listener with secondhand art embarrassment. The corresponding music video also helps by interspersing lipstick-smearing tributes to Marilyn Minter and a bloodied Michelangelo’s hotty David with grainy footage of other musicians and artists lip-synching the song: Weyes Blood, King Woman, Tempers, Boy Harsher, Ron Athey, Drab Majesty (whose Andrew Clinco co-produced the song “Speed of Light” on Triple Fire), Dynasty Handbag, Seth Bogart, a jumpscare by a gnome-resembling, hoodie-wearing Mac DeMarco, and many, many more.
Beyond lending some gravitas to the song (hey, if Ron Athey is singing it, I’m in!), the video places Jacuzzi firmly within a community of other artists and musicians, mostly based in Los Angeles. It also opens up Triple Fire to more contemporary comparisons rather than just being stuck in a 1980s theme party. For instance, the candy-coated dystopia of “Take it or Leave it” and the venomously boppy “Heart Full of Poison” both remind me of Seth Bogart’s 2016 self-titled solo album, when he momentarily set aside his punkier roots and 1960s girl group influences for plastic-haired PeeWee synth schmaltz. Other contemporary musicians that didn’t appear in the video but still linger in my mind are SSION, particularly 2012’s Bent with Jacuzzi’s many screwy vocal manipulations and even Visions-era Grimes in the moments when Jacuzzi’s voice soars ethereally into her upper register on tracks like “Laps of Luxury” and “Scene Ballerina.”
What do Bent and Visions have in common? They’re infinitely listenable. Triple Fire is no different. With each spin, I find something different that catches me, whether the “bossy bottom” wink and nod or, my current favorite moment, the reward of Zac Plastic’s surprise sax on “Heart Full of Poison,” which cuts through all those synths on the rest of the album. Like the calmly creepily possessive final song, “Yo-Yo Boy,” about a plaything-man caught at the end of the narrator’s string, Triple Fire keeps reeling me back in even when I try to leave.