Finally, an answer to that persistent musical question: What if
the Ramones had been Swiss art-school babes? With 46 songs spread over two
CDs, LiLiPUT contains the complete recorded history of a legendary,
all-women punk band — first called Kleenex, then changed to LiLiPUT after the
tissue company threatened legal action — whose influence has been much
broader than the actual reach of their music.
Formed in Zurich in the late Seventies, the band changed mightily
during its five-year history, with guitarist Marlene Marder and
bassist/vocalist Klaudia Schiff as the only mainstays. The band went through
three lead singers: Regula Sing, with her deep, Germanic voice; the young
Chrigle Freund, with her higher-pitched, more energetic style; and finally
Astrid Spirit, who brought a smoother, more loungy sound to the band.
Only the band’s first album, also titled LiLiPUT, was
previously released in the United States. This complete collection was briefly
available, in 1993, as a Swiss import before going out of print, and copies
have been so rare and sought after in the intervening years that they have
reportedly sold for hundreds of dollars at auction.
It makes sense that this music would finally get its due in the
U.S. through Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars, the punk label that grew up around
Nineties riot-grrl icons Bikini Kill. LiLiPUT’s music is proto-riot-grrl if
anything is, the clearest source of the sound and spirit Kill Rock Stars has
made its mark with. And this would seem an ideal time to reintroduce LiLiPUT
to the world, with bands like Le Tigre and Chicks on Speed making music with
the same kind of experimentation and exuberance.
The band’s music leavens the guitar aggression of early punk in
favor of a spare, jumpy, percussive sound. The English lyrics were partially
composed by finding words in the dictionary that were close to what the band
wanted to say and partly by finding words that just sounded right. And the
vocals are from another planet — full of interaction and sonic juxtapositions
and the kind of nonsense syllables that form a wilder, artier kind of doo-wop.
The band sometimes seems to be singing in its own language. This mix results
in bouncy bohemian party music masquerading as intense self-discovery and vice
versa. The critic Greil Marcus once wrote, with great accuracy, that each of
LiLiPUT’s songs sounds like a manifesto and a mud fight.
The second disc of this collection covers the last lineup of the
band, with Astrid Spirit as lead singer, and contains the band’s two official
albums — LiLiPUT and Some Songs — in their entirety and the
single “The Jatz”/”You Did It.” This music is strong, but
is mellower and moodier than the earlier material and doesn’t strike with the
same in-your-face force.
But the early singles captured on disc one are revelatory. The
opening “Nighttoad” sets the tone, with Regula Sing intoning,
“Give yourself lust and try it again,” and Schiff shouting
encouragement in the background (“Come on!”).
“Ain’t You” is the band’s first single and also its
sure shot. On the surface it sounds like a song about sex, but listen closer
and it’s an ode to listening to the radio. A tinny guitar riff jockeys for
space with a barrage of power chords. Drums crash all around, and Sing offers
broken-English instructions: “Take your radio in your life/Take your
radio in your love/Push it in and push it out/Push it out and push it in”
(that last presumably about the on/off button and tuning dial on the radio),
while her bandmates rise from the din to belt out the most invigorating pop-
music call to arms I’ve ever heard: “AIN’T YOU WANNA GET IT ON?” It
sounds like a riot breaking out. It sounds like the last day of school — and
every single second of disc one lives up to its promise.
The band catches you off-guard with weird, fun, exuberant noise
at every turn. “Krimi” opens with a guitar riff that could be Black
Sabbath, then punctuates it with wild, girlish screams and groans. There is
the shouted “EE, EE” that bops through the sing-a-long “Headis
Head.” “Split,” the first song with Freund on lead vocals,
boasts deliriously chaotic group singing and adds some X-Ray Spex-style sax, a
shout of “WOO, WOO, WOO, WOO” periodically bursting out of the mix.
“Eisiger Wind” juxtaposes classic-rock guitar with girl-group
handclaps then bounces vocals against each other like proto-Run-DMC or Beastie
Boys. “Die Matrosen” thrills with a whistled chorus that — outside
of Otis Redding’s grand coda to “Dock of the Bay” — is the greatest
use of pucker-and-blow in rock-and-roll history. “Hitch-Hike” even
adds a tone of menace to their sound, with lyrics like, “She had no money
to pay the train” and “Don’t touch me let me be,” and has the
audacity to use the sound of a rape whistle as the song’s hook.
The best of LiLiPUT communicates an exhilarating sense of
discovery and freedom and joy — a sound you can hear in great doo-wop and
girl groups and Chuck Berry and Little Richard, in other early punk and hip-
hop singles and mid-Seventies Springsteen and the new Outkast and precious
little else.
Quality Craftsmanship fans and old-in-the-mind farts might listen
to this music and think I’m nuts, but I’ll swear on a pile of Stax and Sun
singles that this music, at least the early songs captured on disc one, is
among the most essential and life-affirming rock-and-roll ever recorded. This
is music I’ll wean my kids on someday. I’ll have a 3-year-old galloping around
the house screaming, “AIN’T YOU WANNA GET IT ON?” — Chris
Herrington
Grade: A (Disc 1 A+/Disc 2 A-)
Mission Accomplished
Tricky (Anti-/Epitaph)
Arriving at the dawn of electronica hype, Tricky’s 1995 debut
album, Maxinquaye, was one of the decade’s dozen or so masterpieces.
Combining hip hop, funk, and techno in a uniquely personal mix,
Maxinquaye was dystopian dreamscape but still instantly accessible.
There seemed no question then that we were witnessing the arrival of a major
career artist, a postmodern music maker who made Beck sound like a dilettante
in the Prince-of-the-Nineties sweepstakes. But it’s been all downhill from
there. All the music Tricky has made since has been artistically worthwhile
but increasingly hard to listen to, and his commercial prospects have
diminished accordingly.
With Mission Accomplished, a four-song, 16-minute EP for
new indie label Anti- (also the home of other commercially marginal prestige
artists Tom Waits and Merle Haggard), Tricky is starting over. This brief
reintroduction opens with the industrialized clatter of the title song, which
deploys the vocal hook from Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” (“Big
time/I’m on my way/I’m making it”) in a move that could be either
sardonic, given the artist’s increasing obscurity, or hopeful, given the sense
of freedom that may result from his parting ways with major label
Polygram.
As for the rest, “Crazy Claws” and “Tricky Vs.
Lync” explore the British beat master’s hip-hop obsession with solid if
unexceptional results, and the closing anti-Polygram diatribe “Divine
Comedy” closes the door (please) on his biz-centered vendettas.
Mission Accomplished is an undeniably minor work on its
own terms, but one hopes this is a throat-clearing exercise for better things
to come. — CH
Grade: B