Babes In Toyland

Man will always remain a boy with a body that intoxicates him and a strength he doesn't know how to control. Woman, no. This is the story of a trampled flower that turns into a carnivorous plant. A naked girl adjusting her stockings to tempt her own demons. This is the story of Kat Bjelland and Babes in Toyland.

A childhood spent in Woodburn, Oregon, in the (futile) attempt to hide, beneath a ponytail and a cheerleader uniform, a heart broken by unbearable family conflicts. Then the discovery of music, the escape to San Francisco, the Sugar Baby Dolls (with friend/rival Courtney Love and Jennifer Finch, future L7) who for a while vied with the fearsome Frightwig for the city's top spot, followed by a string of disappointments (Pagan Babies and Italian Whorenuns). Then, suddenly, in 1986, the move to Minneapolis, the meeting with Lori Barbero, a waitress at a night club, a kindred solitude to mirror her own, a soul afflicted by the same kind of abuse and recurring humiliations. Lori had never held a pair of drumsticks, Kat was still unaware of her own vocal talent (so much so that at first they enlist a bassist and a singer), and yet, when "Dust Cake Boy" comes out in 1989, the first single credited to Babes in Toyland, critics can hardly believe their ears: such ritual violence was virtually unheard of in an all-female trio (rounded out by Michelle Leon on bass), and it would remain so for who knows how many years to come.

1992: The Year Punk Has Broken. "Nevermind" and "Ten" each stack up six million copies sold, grunge has hit the jackpot, and in its primordial broth float the most distant and disparate bands, united at best by undercurrents of acrimony and violence (inversely proportional to the pull of the major label orbit). Babes in Toyland, who with "Spanking Machine" (Restless, 1990) had already risen well above the fray, are now preparing their masterpiece. "Fontanelle" is an even more majestic, savage, era-defining record. Probably unrepeatable. The missing link between the antisocial cenobites of beach-punk (Black Flag), the (psycho)analytical, schizoid detachment of no wave (Sonic Youth), and the sadomasochistic, cacophonous noise of Steve Albini's redneck crew.

Bolstered by a production shared with Lee Ranaldo and by the stunning cover shot by Cindy Sherman (depicting a doll lying spread-legged in front of a mirror, like the victim of a sexual homicide), Kat Bjelland stages her definitive psychodrama, an intimate theatre of cruelty in whose sordid plot she is both director and leading performer, a portrayal that has little or nothing to say about the "woman question" raised by the riot grrrls. No feminist punk à la Bikini Kill, no reverse "macho-rock" like L7. "Everything I Do Is True" is Kat's fierce, feral claim to authenticity.

Rather than pinning the male universe down to its indelible responsibilities, she prefers to force it to fully share in the anguish of her "mad flight." An autobiographical, apocalyptic transference in which the man is painted, by turns, as her beloved tormentor, her victim, her forebear or the fruit of her own womb, in a kaleidoscopic alternation of resentment and vulnerability, exaltation and suffering, disgust and seduction.

And not only that: "Bruise Violet" and "Right Now," in fact, shadow two female figures — the twinned dissection of her relationship with Courtney, and a virginal, faint, painfully absent mother (Bjelland only met her own at age 19). Kat bellows, scratches and kicks with a vehemence that can recall Grace Slick plunging into a vat of sulphuric acid in her longer runs, and Kim Gordon in her half-mumbled solfeggios; Barbero's rises and falls trace perspectives as absurd as those in an Escher print. An eclectic, compulsive tribalism that makes her the greatest female figure in the history of her instrument since Maureen Tucker.

Between sonic jangle and Albini-esque distortion, the arid, elementary, thunderous guitar parts bring to mind lava lapilli cooling as they burn living flesh; the bass (Maureen Herman has recently taken over from Michelle Leon) sounds like a "copy and paste" of brainwaves in a trance state. "Bluebell" is a riot of outbursts (drum rolls, stop'n'go, hisses that turn into instruments of ear-torture) and ecstatic slowdowns (spoken passages, guitar chords left to fester), a Freudian spiral staircase down which Kat descends every step, compressing them into the duality of her vocal performance: tiger/chick, adult/child, witch/vestal ("You're deadmeat motherfucker/ You don't try to rape a goddess," she suddenly snaps, like some Medea of the slums).

"Handsome And Gretel" is the absolute high point: the vicious fairy-tale weave of a Perrault scavenging in the mud of South Central, a guitar/chainsaw that crams fifteen-odd years of hardcore into a handful of chords, with what's left of Bjelland's sanity pushed to the limit by an eruption of muck and filth that, draining from her womb, seems to climb back up through her whole body ("I've got crotch that talks/ it talks to all the cocks"). Diabolically clever: under two minutes of pure sonic schizophrenia, achieved without needing to invent much that's formally new.

"Blood" is an industrial voodoo rite driven by flamenco flourishes and honed on Sonic Youth-style guitars (and Kat gives you chills with the way she can turn a melisma into an infernal whinny). "Magick Flute" (written and sung by Barbero) is a puzzle: it has Cramps-like guitar phrases, spastic-epileptic convulsions worthy of Pere Ubu, cajun drums and a cyber-punk chorus, yet it doesn't resemble any one of these things in particular, nor even their sum. "Won't Tell" sounds like the lullaby a little girl sings to herself, lost in the middle of a Big Black-style noise-storm, with Jefferson Airplane playing inside the eye of the mushroom cloud.

"Quiet Room" is a long psychedelic jangle arpeggiated in the manner of Sonic Youth, an instrumental placenta, a piece of autogenic training that, for a moment, distracts us from worse nightmares. Indeed, "Spun" is pure blues metempsychosis set within a noise-core context torn open by two horrendous soprano high notes from Kat, which seem to come straight out of a "White Rabbit" sung in the women's ward of Camarillo. "Jungle Train" is a chilling epileptic fit thrashing between snarling fairground counter-melodies and nursery-school stammering solfeggios, pow wow, syncopated stops and noise-inflicted tortures that would put Jesus Lizard to shame.

"Pearl" unleashes a searing punk-rock springing straight from the wellsprings of the sonic stone age. "Real Eyes" is a nursery rhyme populated by tortured screams, acidic fuzz, and galloping timpani and toms. "Mother" contains a textbook heavy-metal stop-start riff that the band prefers to drown in voodoo-jazz progressions, breaking up its continuity and letting it pulse now and then, lethal as a cluster bomb, while Kat stitches yet another possessed face onto her Oedipal/maternal obsession, right down to the gibberish regression of the finale. Perhaps already sensing she had reached her peak, the record literally ends in wreckage and shards with "Gone," a guitar-driven homily recited over the "metaphonic" sounds of domestic violence. Because by that point there was truly little left for Kat to do but withdraw into the obscurity of anonymity from which we are unworthily summoning her here. Now a mother, no longer a daughter, and finally at peace with herself, it would seem.

Survivor.

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29/06/2008