COATHANGERS - Scramble

Not much is known about the Coathangers, aside from the fact that they're all girls from Atlanta and that "Scramble" is their second album. After the solid success of the Vivian Girls, perhaps a new wave of angry young riot-punk girls with distorted guitars and tattoos proudly on display down their forearms was to be expected. It's ultimately a story that's never really stopped, from Delta 5 to the Raincoats, by way of the Slits, Erase Errata and Bikini Kill, just to name a few. And the Coathangers fit squarely into this female-driven narrative, at times coming across like a dazed, amphetamine-fuelled Spectorian girl group, wedged somewhere between the most tongue-tied post-punk minimalism and the sixties garage sound of America's angriest, filthiest basements.

And yet in the end the trick works perfectly: once you slot the album into the player, you find yourself inside a sinister world populated by scorched dolls, hysterical nursery rhymes and wobbly scribbles of broken-down guitars that give it that slightly naive, scruffy touch without which there'd be no real authenticity. One song is as good as the next, each sharing the same mangled sweetness, like a crumpled bag of sweets tossed into a cement mixer, and what matters most here is the overall impact. From this angle, it almost feels like flipping through a notebook of crude little poems sung by a bunch of schoolgirls with a bloody knife hidden under their white pinafores.

Vaguely tribal rhythms, cloyingly pop vocal harmonies alternating with drunken screams, and chewed-up, stammering guitar phrasing seem to be the Coathangers' main ingredients, and their music ends up resembling the cartoonish, regressive infantilism of the Ramones filtered through the sneering nervousness of the Stooges and the cerebral neurosis of Captain Beefheart and the Fall.

A debut that, ultimately, as already said, seduces and wins you over, standing outside the dominant conventions and thoroughly over the top, as unsettling as it is disturbing. We'll be hearing about them again (maybe).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

05/05/2009