Album Reviews

‘Live Laugh Love’ is the sort of mantra that influencers swear by, smattering it as a caption on all their Insta posts alongside other roll-your-eyes clichés like ‘Life is a journey, enjoy the ride’ or ‘Be your own kind of beautiful’. Still not as bad as‘Might delete later but…’. Anyway, you get the picture. Any combination of words that makes you throw up in your mouth, will do. So I’m not sure why Chastity Belt would pick it as the name of their first new album in half a decade - their fifth overall - but they did. Luckily, the new songs don’t reflect the horrible, horrible title.

Hailing from Walla Walla, Washington, the four-piece (Julia Shapiro, Annie Truscott, Lydia Lund and Gretchen Grimm) has spent the past ten years creating the kind of laid-back guitar music that has carved out a special little place between dream pop, shoegaze and slacker rock. It’s a sound that continues to work wonders for them on ‘Live Laugh Love’. Opener ‘Hollow’ sounds surprisingly bright and sunny in spite of the darker lyrics dealing with the feeling of being lost. ‘Chemtrails’ on the other hand sounds exactly like what you’d expect from a song that packs the line ‘moments move like chemtrails in my mind’. Elsewhere, there’s chiming beauty to be found in ‘Kool-Aid’ and ‘I-90 Bridge’rocks in the subtlest of ways while making sadness sound as beautiful as it ever has.

A new Chastity Belt is always a treat and ‘Live Laugh Love’ is no exception to that rule.

Live Laugh Love track list:

1. Hollow
2. Funny
3. Clumsy
4. It's Cool
5. Kool-Aid
6. Chemtrails
7. Blue
8. Tethered
9. I-90 Bridge
10. Laugh
11. Like That