CCMusic.com

I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is Chastity Belt's third and finest full-length album to date. Recorded live in July of 2016, at Jackpot! In Portland, OR with producer/mixer Matthew Simms of Wire, it's a dark and uncommonly beautiful set of mood-driven rock that's also unabashedly introspective. More personal and more direct than 2015's marvelous Time to Go Home, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is a brave and often exhilarating tangle of mixed feelings and haunting melodies that connects dizzying anguish ("This Time of Night") to shimmering insight ("Different Now") to gauzy ambiguity ("Stuck"). It's a serious record but not a serious departure, defined best, perhaps, by a line that Julia Shapiro shares early on it's staggering title track: "I wanna be sincere."