There’s nothing particularly “pretty” about Pretty Baby’s music. I would use different modifiers to explain it: Exceptional, experimental, aggressive, fearless, adventurous, cinematic, and picturesque come to mind. But especially on the band’s debut LP Layaway Plot, “pretty” is a piss-poor adjective to act as a definition for the music. Pretty Baby’s music is what happens when the facade wears away and reveals what’s rotten and real in the gut.
And for that reason, it gets a big thumbs up from yours truly.
Charlotte’s Rusty Colton (vox/guitars) is the mind behind Pretty Baby, forming the project back in 2016 and originally taking the singer-songwriter route. But after several years in the Charlotte indie scene, the original sheen had faded, and with a few friends, Conlon started to explore darker, less “pretty” alleyways of sound.
Those friends, by the way, include Vince D’Ambrosio (drums/percussion/backing vox), Lenny Muckle (bass/synth/backing vox), and Ryan Halberg (guitar/synth/metal staircase). Together, they formed their new vibe through disparate sounds, ideas, moods, and influences including Dischord Records bands, the Richmond punk scene, and Olympia grunge. Sure enough, on Layaway Plot, you hear elements of Nirvana, Fugazi, Rites of Spring, Strike Anywhere, and much more.
The album’s eleven tracks showcase the tight post-hardcore performances that the band has taken throughout Charlotte and most of the Mid-Atlantic states. But the darkness in the music had to stem from somewhere. That came in 2023, when Conlon lost his mother and Muckle was commiserating about costs related to taking care of a loved one when they’ve passed. The indecency surrounding death and overall grief led to Pretty Baby directing their vibe toward the grave, and influenced the title of Layaway Plot: A space for a grave you can’t take until you’ve paid it off.
One might feel anger in being forced to pay in such a predatory way in order to bury someone. That anger flows throughout Layaway Plot, building in the intro “Late Antique Ice Age” and exploding in the short-but-sweet “Heart Failure”. From there, the intensity spirals: “Sleepdrunk”, a melodic hardcore marvel, rushes with emotion, heavy feedback, and a guitar riff hinting at early Bloc Party. The speed picks up on “Ghost Teller”, featuring some fine lyrical work and mixed metaphors from Colton: “Another coward of salt eaten up by the rain and deer / You get not rest in the dirt, early morning commute to the atmosphere”. The death allusions ring poetic but not too vague: Anyone paying attention will appreciate them, but perhaps after a few listens.
Despite the incredible punk sensibility – especially on “Hector’s Loop”, in which the band invokes their own name – there are moments of tenderness, even if they’re relative to the album’s overall pain. “Difference Engine” stands out as an interlude as a hypnotic post-rock instrumental, and sections of the six-minute “8:25 Greenwich Fucking Mean” turn toward the softer side of Pretty Baby’s repertoire. But the end of the album goes full force face-down into the dirt: Between “Grappled & Poisoned”, “Atom Bomb”, and “Faraway Lights”, fourteen full minutes of unrelenting heaviness await the listener, with the latter track making up half that runtime. The final lyric: “It’s done; all you ever wanted has come and gone / It’s done; the time to fix forever has come and gone.”
With that, the album ends with “Pretty Baby Sings to the Mud”, a wordless opus capping off Colton’s grief and putting a pin in the anger for now. Pretty Baby has put everything into this record emotionally: As a vessel for pain, it stores it quite well. But pain never goes away; it remains unfinished, as the sudden ending of the album’s final track insists.
Pretty Baby’s name is great irony; I’ve already mentioned how their music is anything but. However, it’s damn good, and it acts as a portal through which the band can process powerful emotions. That sounds somewhat beautiful; in fact, some might even call it “pretty”. But there’s nothing pretty about grief or anger. It’s just one of those things, like taxes, that are certain in life. You just have to deal with it in whatever way you can. Even if that means you pay for it in installments.
Take a listen to “Sleepdrunk” from Layaway Plot and follow Pretty Baby on their socials below.
Written by Will Sisskind
