おとぼけビ～バ～ [Otoboke Beaver] - Itekoma Hits

This female quartet began ten years ago and are named after a hooker hotel next to a bandmember’s high school. That information answers more questions than I can ask, and these perky punkettes don’t so much take a page out of the Shonen Knife playbook as shred it to pieces. Their third album (but first in six years; some tracks are from earlier singles) bristles with Ramones-esque efficiency (14 songs in 26 minutes, some as short as 18 seconds), and is essentially speed metal vomited out in venomous ferocity that’s analogous to having your skull power-drilled with a ten-ton spike. Songs like ‘Binge Eating Eating Binge Drinking Bulimia’ are representative of the self-deprecating anger spewing from Accorinrin‘s throat. There’s no shortage of talented musicianship here, as some of Yoyoyoshi’s razor-sharp solos (e.g. ‘datsu . hikage no onna’) are heart-racing dynamos, Hiro-chan’s thumping basslines on ‘Introduce me to your family’ are quite Talking Heads-ish, and the Crimsonesque start/stop-on-a-dime theatrics of ‘What do you mean you have to talk to me at this late date?’ are heart-attack inducing.

I think I detected a thinly-veiled Dead Kennedy’s riff rocketing out of ‘I’m tired of your repeating story’ and even if you can scream ‘Anata watashi daita ato yome no meshi’ three times fast, the gals will sing it ten times faster! The cute playground singalong ‘Bad Luck’ offers a brief respite and ‘S’il vous plait’ is like speed-surfing on barbed-wire waves. But the rest will clean out your sinuses and rip the cobwebs out of your brain.

As you can tell from the song titles and vitriolic tonsil-shredding, these gals are pissed at something…someone…the world, so just keep the blood pressure medicine close to hand and stay out of their way and try to keep the blood spurting out of your eyes and ears off the walls.

[You can catch all the fun across the UK during their “Golden Week Tour” next week. Venues and tix here.]