Revolving visual artist Virginia Piersol, filmmaker Gail Vachon and photographer Barbara Ess; Y Pants combined feminist poetics with economical instrumentation - toy piano, ukulele, Mickey Mouse drum kit and shitty FX - in playfully spiked and infectious grooves full of swooning choruses and dippy licks that deliver their politics in sharp pinches.
They were a fixture of Manhattan’s downtown scene, smartly compared with The Raincoats for those vocal harmonies and a predilection for spare but pointed, driving rhythms, which are best heard in the slompy slide of Obvious, set to a killer vocal hook “don’t be afraid to be boring” written by novelist and critic Lynne Tillman, or with an hypnotic, ‘up’-ness in the likes of Barbara’s Song or the headlong, Neu!-like momentum of We Have Everything, in Love’s A Disease’s lopsided disco-punk, and the strange, byzantine wiggle of What Do You take Me For.