There's a certain awareness bespoken by the simple, quiet title of the new Butchies record. But ignore, for a moment, the extraneous facts-- they're a trio, they've been releasing records for the past three years, the square root of the number of songs on the record equals three, etc.-- and focus on the fact that this is their third full-length release.

3 marks ex-Team Dresch frontwoman Kaia Wilson's personal best for the most output from any of her projects. And now that excuses of beginner's luck/jitters and sophomore slump/fluke are behind them, it's time for Alison Martlew, Melissa York, and Wilson to truly prove themselves as a band that can comfortably exist outside of the shadow of Wilson's past, and etch a name for themselves that's all their own.

And they do. Like the two most significant female punk collectives that immediately preceded them, Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the Butchies take full advantage of the importance of their third release by making good on the potential of their previous two, and delivering their best album to date. Like Pussywhipped or Dig Me Out, 3 indelibly marks the Butchies with a simple, singular adjective: vital.

Through 3's refinement and cleanness, the Butchies have found their collective voice. Gone are the oddball noodling of their debut, Are We Not Femme?, and the constricting punk/hardcore framework that made Population 1975 partially redundant and overwrought. 3 finds the trio still armed with an arsenal of power chords, paralyzing basslines, and explosive drums. Only now, the Butchies aren't drowning in reverb, or at the prey of their genre. On 3, the girls fuck with conventions of punk and hardcore, letting elements slip into more complicated structures, and allowing these constituents to slip around Wilson's most consistently rewarding songwriting to date.

The record's opener, "Anything Anthology," is the Butchies at their brazen best. It begins with a ragged, slap-happy electric guitar intro that leads into a glazed proclamation by Wilson: "This is nothing that you've ever felt before." The song accelerates into raucous, break-neck punk before slowing to a mid-tempo stomp for the song's chorus and slinking out with the grace of a fading cyclone. When Wilson sings, "This is sorrow/ This is acrobats," she unwittingly delivers a succinct critique of her voice: her ardent vocals flutter over and flip under the track, particularly when she unleashes a high-register "whoo-hoo-hoo." (The extra "hoo" proves she really means it).

Wilson's croon remains the centerpiece of the Butchies, as has been the case for anything she's lent her pipes to. Previously, her angelic delivery has found itself at odds with the grind and churn of her tunes (her acoustic solo releases notwithstanding), which has provided a fascinating tension. And she's equally dazzling on 3. While some delicious stress might be missing in these less jarring tunes, Wilson capitalizes on this absence and proves herself one of the most versatile, technically sound voices in current punk.

Of course, two adroit musicians in their own rights provide Wilson with outstanding support. Martlew's lean bass playing adds buoyant funk to the mix. York, who attacks her drumkit with the gusto of Animal (the Muppet), holds and changes tempos like she's begging for a whiplash lawsuit.

All of this is wrapped up in the sophisticated gift that is 3. Even the slower songs, which tend to start out shaky, never dissolve into doldrums due to pointed hooks that poke like needles through the tracks' frieze carpeting. The transition into uniformly melodic tunes is so expertly executed that the one jarring moment, "Huh Huh Hear," sounds completely out of place. But this slight regression hardly mars the record, since the great moments far outweigh this three-minute misstep.

3 is the Butchies' most understated record to date, both musically and lyrically. It's less political, though the trio's lesbianism remains obvious, even when their tell-all bandname is ignored. "Queercore," in less capable hands, would be an exploitative sub-genre that seeks novelty in sexuality and offers little else (a la Pansy Division). But as Jeanette Winterson points out in her essay, "The Semiotics of Sex": "...problems start when we assume that the fact of our queerness bestows on us special powers." I'm not suggesting that the Butchies have ever adhered to that assumption; I'm merely stating that if the Butchies ever came off as gimmicky, or dependent on their sexuality to sell records, 3 should silence naysayers. In fact, the record's title is better suited as a description of the layered, visceral, and human nature of the record; for the first time, the Butchies are consistently playing in that number of dimensions.

-Richard M. Juzwiak