Band of the Month: Le Butcherettes Bleed Acoustic Punk on 'Shave The Pride' (CraveOnstage Performance)

A listen through Le Butcherettes’ new album A Raw Youth claws at the seams of what one immediately considers ‘punk rock’. Through a poet’s heart and furiously wild spirit, the third LP from Teri Gender Bender and friends puts a far more political snarl in the Mexican garage-punk world they inhabit, and the ferocity of passion through which they operate is equal parts enchanting and electrifying.

Le Butcherettes have two previous album releases, their 2011 debut Sin, Sin, Sin and the 2014 offering Cry Is For The Flies – but the momentum behind A Raw Youth propels the notion that this is their time to strike on a much larger scale. The band is comprised of Teri, drummer Chris Common and bassist Jamie Aaron Aux, who recorded the album at RLP Studios (The Morgue Portable Disaster Unit) in El Paso, Texas. Omar Rodriguez Lopez once again produced, as he has done for both previous Le Butcherettes’ releases.

Early arrivals who tuned in or came to the band’s initial shows may have been drawn in by Rodriguez’s gravity through The Mars Volta, but make no mistake: this is Teri’s project. Born Teri Suarez, this Guadalajara export has become Teri Gender Bender, one of the rawest, most potently vulnerable and visionary minds in rock. With co-signs from Henry Rollins, Shirley Manson, Iggy Pop (who guests on A Raw Youth) and beyond, her sociopolitical gusto, passionately volatile voice and explosively emotive depth have found a proper home on Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings. At times a sweetly delicate heartbreak melody spinner and a wild creature exploring humanity through an alien vessel at others, Bender’s onstage charisma is an impossible captivation.

For our Band of The Month taping, Teri and Chris met us at an off-the-map restaurant in Hollywood, a secret location decorated with ornately weird artifacts, as if a rock star’s bedroom was decorated by Immortan Joe from Mad Max. The duo, in blood-red outfits, was astoundingly sweet and engaging in person, delivering a gorgeously stripped performance of a few new songs from A Raw Youth. Watch below as Teri commpletely inhabits “Shave The Pride,” with some impressive brushwork from Chris, exclusively on Crave: