Another one I discovered via Dying Scene, I like this album's arrangements and production, so dirty and distorted you could take it for something recorded in the 70s... but I mean really, not as in "we're doing vintage here".
The Bandcamp notes document extensively the band's influences, to which I would add some that I detect perhaps only due to my own listener story. For example, I hear a pinch of the first L7, Babes in Toyland and Hole albums in the singer's voice. The guitar sonority has an incredible personality a la Dick Dale/ Man or Astroman?, half surf half Tex Mex; again not something that comes across as an exercise of style, but as something very authentic that emanates from the songs, from music made one's own, lived from within. My favorite track is perhaps "Hiawatha", with a mysterious riff that would do well in say a Tarantino road movie. The rawness of the whole thing also makes me think of The Stooges sometimes. So there's a rich soup of influences here, and you probably will find your own when you listen to it. Same as I said with Fare Game, the album shows a surprising maturity for a first effort. The songs are like sonic passages, well arranged and connected, with perhaps a bit less of emphasis on structures and closure, but which propose a good "trip" from beginning to end. Lindsay DeGroot's vocals, continuously ranging from tender to aggressive, and all the gamut between, give the record a nice dynamism and variety. The album also includes a very personal, almost unrecognizable cover of Britney Spear's pop hymn "Toxic", here turned into a gloomy, almost masochist declaration of vulnerability (the way she phrases that "Baby can't you see...") Another favorite of mine is "Girl Hater": "I don't get it baby/Why do you hate us ladies?". The band is labelled in the DS review as "feminist", and yet, lyrics like that seem to point to a new path, an attempt at trying something new. If we switch 5,000 years of male domination for other 5,000 of female domination we haven't advanced much, have we? The stance of this song comes to me as something like "Please be clear, we women can kick ass harder than men if need be. But is it really necessary? Let's be friends!" On that note, there's the only big "but" I can put to this band: one of its members is male, and I'm sure the only reason he's been chosen is as a sexual object. It makes me sick the oversexualization of males in modern music nowadays... :P
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Nacho Jordi
I have a guitar and I'm gonna use it Archives
September 2018
Categories |