Chelsea Wolfe has never been afraid of incorporating a broad range of genres in her music (including goth, industrial, and electronic), but the eloquent gloom and corrosive textures of metal have been a key ingredient on albums like 2017's Hiss Spun and 2015's Abyss. One of Wolfe's longer-running collaborators has been drummer Jess Gowrie, who played on Hiss Spun, worked with Wolfe in the band Red Host in the late 2000s, and is a member of the doom metal band Horseneck. If Wolfe and Gowrie were to become full partners on a project, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that their metal influences would be pushed up in the mix, and that's just what has happened on Self-Surgery, the debut EP from Mrs. Piss. This music is a lot louder and significantly more raw than the lion's share of Wolfe's work, though it remains music influenced by metal that still isn't exactly metal itself. Like a number of Mike Patton's projects, Mrs. Piss uses the building blocks of metal (in this case, the doom and experimental subgenres) as part of the framework for music that also welcomes many other structures, in particular goth and industrial overtones, as it dives deep into the dark, noisy, assaultive heart of these songs. Creeping through eight tracks in less than 20 minutes, Mrs. Piss have given us a short, sharp dose of music that is artful and intelligent even as it embraces the grim joys of noise for noise's sake. Self-Surgery's greatest flaw is that there are too many ideas with too little time to work them out, and this may have worked better with four somewhat longer tracks instead of eight short ones. Regardless, this is a bold, brave effort from two artists willing to push the boundaries of their music, and Mrs. Piss is a side project that has more than earned its reason to exist.
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