Lost Time
The second album from Seattle’s Tacocat‘s is full of concise, energetic pop-punk, built on surfy guitars, sharp melodies and the whip-smart feminist wit of singer Emily Nokes. These brief, conversational songs fly by like text messages to a best friend – emoji-laden missives about girl power, cats, aliens, weed and pop-culture. Lost Time‘s opener, “Dana Katherine Scully”, is an ode to the X-Files star. On “Men Explain Things To Me,” Nokes channels her Pacific Northwest punk forbear Kathleen Hanna, taunting, “Tell me to calm down, tell me to calm down/Tell me to calm down, again!” The album’s standout is “I Love Seattle,” in which growling guitars and sickly sweet vocal hooks back lyrics that shrug off the apocalyptic natural disaster scientists are predicting will hit the Pacific Northwest sometime in the future: “Did you hear that the world is ending?/Yeah yeah, we already know,” sings Nokes. You can almost see her rolling her eyes. After all, she’s got less important stuff to worry about.