Don’t listen to your parents. Art-school does pay off- especially if you‚re Melissa Logan and Alex-Murray Leslie, of Chicks on Speed, whose first band Seppi Bar was born as an art project in 1997 then transformed into a music project when Kiki Moorse joined.
”Press the Spacebar,” the Chicks 4th full-length album, has art school written all over its cutting and edgy improv rock. A dadaist collage of absurdity, provocation and politics, this is DIY music, Euro style. Aiding and abetting is DJ/producer Cristian Vogel of the Barcelona band, The No Heads, rapper silly bitch and the chipmunk choir.
After you leave your expectations at the door, danke, give the album a few listens to get fully acquainted with the Chicks definitely-notsoft-and-fluffy world. Look beyond the shades of Le Tigre, SonicYouth and The Raincoats, and you’ll find a thrilling, if sometimes uneven electro conceptual canvas painted with images of Bush, Yoko Ono, popular culture, S& M and housework. Add the sound of cookies smashing, paint scraping, vacuuming and walking up and down the stairs. Next, plaster on some weird bumper sticker lyrics: “You’ve become a sales pitch/ History will outlive us, forgive us, forget us/ Shampoo is really important.”
The Chicks “perform” these songs as if they had musical Tourrette's, often repeating a single line over and over as in the annoying, barely intelligible “Culture Vulture Part 3.”
This unorthodox approach works for the rest of the album, especially the tongue in cheeky, feminist “Household Song,” “Having babies makes me feel so real/Dusting the shelves is so sexy.” Suddenly spring-cleaning looks fun. Other standouts are “Mitte Bitte” a conflicted view, sung in German, of Berlin as tourist hotspot. The beautifully strange “Fuzzy Nipple” which will have you wondering just why does “the fuzzy nipple scream while Yoko Ono flushes the toilet?” |