Some Mutts (Can't Be Tamed)

Amy Taylor has the rare quality of seeming genuinely dangerous — not in the cultivated way of performers who've studied the aesthetic of menace, but in the way of someone who simply hasn't been fully socialized out of it. This track runs on Melbourne pub-rock energy filtered through a sensibility that owes as much to the wilder end of '70s Australian rock as to anything currently happening in punk. The guitars are stripped and driving, locking into a groove that stays mean without ever getting mathy or precious about itself. The rhythm section plants itself and refuses to move, giving Taylor's vocals the kind of stable ground that paradoxically allows her to sound completely untethered. She sings about wildness the way someone describes a quality they actually possess rather than aspire to — the defiance isn't performed, it's just present. There's a physical quality to the song that makes it difficult to hold still for, the tempo insisting on movement, on taking up space, on refusing the posture of apology. It suits the specific euphoria of moving through the world with zero interest in being palatable, the feeling of having abandoned the project of being agreeable entirely. Floor of a loud venue, strangers, humid air, that specific hour when the night stops being something that might happen and simply becomes what is happening.