On the cover three Glaswegian rock chicks sit astride their gleaming motorbikes, ready to rip down rock’s highway with guitars blazing. They might come from the city of lo-fi, but this is less riot grrrl than Girlschool.
Pink Kross really want to be that bunch of dumbed-down New York pensioners The Ramones, as evidenced on ‘Lobotomy Bay’: “I wanna be like Dee Dee/He’s the one to show me”. Songs titles like ‘A-Bomb Prom’ and ‘Dragstar 2000’ abound, while lyrics centre around being dumped, doing the dumping, stock car racing and the elemental art of adolescent screeching, all dealt with in three minutes and three chords.
It’s a startlingly simple – and slightly annoying – universe, where a song called ‘PMT’ is a fiery fuck-you, where ‘Egyptian’ attempts to pogo around the Middle East and ‘Scumbag’ is a snotty shout. Obviously. The result is a warts-and-all, bum-noted collection of thrashes that proudly proclaims itself to be recorded in “ear-splitting stereo” despite sounding like it was taped on a bootlegger’s Dictaphone.
But if The Ramones can get away with a whole career of interchangeable songs, you’re inclined to let Pink Kross have at least one album’s worth of aping their idols. After all, you expect hero worship from the young. In this age of serial revivalism, what’s everyone else’s excuse?
