Lately I’ve been in touch with some feminine sides of electropop beef. And I like it.
There’s a whole cadre of feisty females involved here. With sub-Tarantino fantasy girl names, Kiki Moorse, Melissa Logan and (ok, less so) Alex Murray-Leslie, comprise the Chicks themselves. But Peaches, Le Tigre, Miss Kitten and Tina Weymouth ( Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads ) are all lending their larynxes too. Not stopping there, the vocals invoke a whole fantasy set of supporting characters through association: we have the Arayan distance of Nico, the deadpan irony of Kim Gordon ( Sonic Youth ), the punk inveighing of The Slits . Allow some modern production techniques to weigh in and presto! Spectres of Goldfrapp and Madonna too suddenly rear up.
Former art school hens, Chicks on Speed are based in Berlin and their music is accordingly conceptual. With more than subtle shades of famous compatriots Kraftwerk, cosmetically electronic beats are fused with mantra choruses. Feminist, anti-material girl polemics are snipped, clipped and filtered to pepper these mechanoid antics. Shooting from the Hip opens with deliberately flat vocals referencing Jeff Koons over an ebullient backing track that is a convincing definition of four-to-the-floor europop bisecting glam rock. To invoke that most vogue-ish of buzzwords, “electroclash,” seems imperative in describing most of what follows. We Don’t Play Guitars has the not-so-dulcet tones of Peaches shot through it, providing the “clash,” while Wordy Rapping Hood is an apt title, after opening with some impudent Nokia ringtone sampling – how beepy and “electro” can you get? Despite this, such a Tom Tom Club cover adds little except length to the kooky original. Both Coventry and Culture Vulture have nice guitar samples and the rimshot work on the former makes you think as though the star Germanic chanteuse listing “people and places and places and people” has usurped Craig David on the track. Most of the programming is less generic however, with mandatory glitches and squelches injecting enough just variegation to the album. Universal Pussy is a frank joyride that’s comparable to pared down contemporary material from Goldfrapp .
Other notables: Love Life is a funky little ditty on celebrity boyfriends, but who couldn’t relate to the _ “No reference, no consequence…”_ of the chorus? I can’t decide whether either the defiantly art house anti-capitalism of the title track and Sell Out or the pastiche electronica its melded to would work as well independently but they provide a rip-roaring combination. Oh, and there’s a darkly ambient hidden track which is cool too.
As a dip into the stream of female consciousness this is very entertaining. D.Rose
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