Pink Nasty

We’d really like to bust out all our filthy Janet Jackson puns to describe Austin, Texas–based performer Pink Nasty, but it wouldn’t be fair, as the artist formerly known as Sara Beck is not really nasty at all. A local sensation down home in her adoptive Texas, the singer-songwriter cultivated a loyal posse to help her make a new album, Mold the Gold, which she recorded for her own label. There’s her musical sidekick Will Oldham (the erstwhile Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and his brother Paul, who hosted the sessions at his barn, as well as Beck’s brother, who goes by the name of Black Nasty and cuts X-rated comedy rap tracks like “Gimme Your Butt.” The snark must be hereditary.

Fortunately, those wink-wink monikers don’t detract from Beck’s songs, quirky little gems that make adroit use of pop conventions while thoroughly asserting individual charms. If, indeed, a tune called “BTK Blues,” set amid the return of a notorious serial killer in Beck’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas, can ever be said to possess charm. But it does, offering slices of suburban anomie—“We could go to Starbucks/And talk a lot of shit about people we don’t know now/They probably live in New York”—offset by a mock-ominous chorus: “It’s dark now, you should head home.” Her knack for sketching perfectly mundane details and introspective ache is so vivid you can smell the Midwestern drift hanging in the air like diesel smoke over the interstate. And we wouldn’t call that nasty, just skillfully novelistic.—Steve Dollar