LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS

ALBUM REVIEW:  LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS – “Glistening Vivid Splash” – (Skin Graft) LP/CD/Digital.-

Lovely perspirations, risk of infection? No longer sanitary, they kind of probe you, sometimes in a slightly menacing way, sometimes in an almost playful way, playful like that cat with a traumatised mouse. Chicago’s Lovely Little Girls, “an avant-rock band directed by artist Gregory Jacobsen and bassist Alex Perkolup”, have a new album, Glistening Vivid Splash is yet another set of delightfully probling tunes, more clashing of thoughts, unseemly  circumstances? Purified? Irresistable? Incubating… An album that’s immediately there in your mind, probing, touching your inner state, the odour of what? It isn’t that they’re disturbing, or that they’re strange – well actually they are very strange, or course they are – it isn’t that their world isn’t beautiful (even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder), it isn’t that it is beautifully strange, it is;nt any of those things. Lovely Little Girls’ awkward musical probing is a thing of beauty, occasionally graceful so, often awkwardly so (in the best of ways), deliciously probing, and who doesn’t like to be probed now and again? .

LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS

Lovely Little Girls, without really ever sounding too obviously like anyone else, push all the right musical buttons – Cardiacs, Dead Kennedys, Dragnet, Flying Luttenbachers, Batman, Danny Elfman, Lalo Schfrin, Rude Mechanicals, the more twisted less irritating moments of Faith No More – oh yes, they have the magic. Lovely Little Girls are disturbingly good, uniquely so, they’re like all your favourite cartoon villains plotting the takeover of the city before the Joker does, they’re almost lovable (almost).  And they sing in such angelic ways of the odour of death, and stab the eyes and vile trials and trails and you know that feeling when you climb aboard an old wooden fairground ride and you’re not sure what that congealed sticky substance down there on the safety handle is.

Lovely Little Girls are delightfully hard-boiled, they’re probably not good for you, some days they’re just disturbing, other days they’re disturbingly good, most days the stimulatingly brilliant.  Brilliant in a disturbingly positive kind of way, they’re like rubbing a balloon against the static and then watching it gracefully float around the room only to be punched every couple of minutes as it tries to land.  They’re like smelling the cheese, picking that scab just to see, they’re like all your imperfections magnified, that slightly past the sell by date fruit fermenting over there in the bowl – cut the throat, cut the throat  putrid paranoia, wholesome stimulation, they’re muscular legs meticulously cleaned, filth not abound in every corner, squalor alive for sure.

Lovely Little Girls are a glorious band, a beautiful band, they’re a clash of fleshy colour and the stimuli that that arouses and in this, their latest album, they’ve gone and done it all all over again. It isn’t that they’ve made an album better then anything else they’ve ever done, it is that they’ve done it again and without repeating a previous exercise, Glistening Vivid Splash is as good an album as anything the always wonderfully good Lovely Little Girls have ever done…  Another highly recommended album, everything we expected it to be….   (sw)

LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS / SKIN GRAFT RECORDS