“And make sure you put that there’s going to be a real Lamborghini at the Museum,” Lauren “L.G.” Gilbert, the muscle behind the hustle known as Thelma and the Sleaze, tells the Scene by phone. The singer, songwriter and criminally underrated guitarist is emphatic, and that is understandable. She released a new album called Fuck, Marry, Kill in August, and on Saturday, she has a show at The Basement to celebrate its arrival on vinyl. There will also be a pop-up show called TATS Museum at Julia Martin Gallery, featuring 10 years of Thelma and the Sleaze art and ephemera. At the pop-up, you will also apparently find an Italian supercar.
“Yeah. Because I am working very hard to accomplish this goal. It is not an easy goal for a snaggle-tooth, white-trash girl to acquire a Lamborghini with no money. So I want that Let’s talk about the album title. “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” if you didn’t know, is the Meyers-Briggs test for horny delinquents conducting back-of-the-class psychology experiments on their equally horny and delinquent peers. Pick three people — strangers, friends, celebrities, doesn’t matter. Now choose which of those people you would bed, which you would wed and which you would bump off. Simple? Sure. Crude? Definitely. A pretty solid way to suss out someone’s mental state? Surprisingly, yes. The new record by your friendly neighborhood scuzz-rockers that shares the game’s name is also a pretty solid way to separate those in the know from the squares.
“It is not for everybody,” Gilbert says. “But that’s how rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be.”
It is easy to take Thelma and the Sleaze for granted. TATS have been the neighborhood garage band for a decade, bashing out outstanding shows and tunes, sometimes at an incredible pace with little, if any, institutional support. (Perhaps you’ll recall the 29-day, 31-show intracity tour the group took in 2016, documented in Scene contributor Seth Graves’ film Kandyland.) All this time, they have been grinding away and pulling parts from deep in the junkyard, creating a hot-rodded listening experience with midcentury America splattered all over its mud flaps. Somewhere between The Shangri-Las and Black Oak Arkansas, Gilbert and her girl gang are revved up and ready to rumble. It is easy to forget that most neighborhoods don’t even have a band, much less a queer Southern rock band, whose rotating cast predominantly features women.
Thelma and the Sleaze’s appeal lies in what rock journalist Lillian Roxon, writing about The Shangri-Las, called “the necrophilia of it all,” that flirtation with death that typifies the most dangerous rock ’n’ roll. TATS have their sex and violence all twisted up in a way that looks familiar, like a pinner of Thai stick burning slowly between some hesher’s lips. They are prurient without being predatory, brazen but just respectable enough that no one will question Gilbert’s Southern bona fides. It is a delicate balancing act for the band, who run their razor blades along the fine lines that separate rock ’n’ rollers from polite society, creating minacious vibes in an otherwise cozy nostalgia.
Fuck, Marry, Kill is libidinous — hear “Long Cold Woman” for a swaggering, strutting specimen — and listening feels like you’re being propelled loins-first through a pastiche of classic-rock-ism. Yet Gilbert & Co. know how to stay on the right side of the classic-rock-creep threshold. And that’s refreshing: You’ve got riffs for days and rebellion in spades on tracks like “I Bet You Cried,” “Down” and, of course, “Lamborghini,” without the gross aftertaste of sexism.
Where previous TATS releases were looser affairs, making FMK was painstaking.
“I was very protective over this album, and I was very uncompromising in terms of what I wanted the outcome to be for the first time,” says Gilbert. “Basically [there’s been] no daddy’s money or theoretical knowledge or any industry help involved in my career at all. Everything that I’ve done has been pretty learn-as-you-go: Run before you can walk, turn the Space Echo up, just let the fucking dice fall.”
The current incarnation of the group plus a heap of special guests will appear at Saturday’s show. There you can see for yourself how the contrarian spirit that has suffused TATS’ oeuvre has come back around as polished and professional — if being totally badass counts as a profession.
