As intensely as she screams like she’s ruptured a spleen and is strapped down in a dirty back-street surgery without anaesthetic getting a new one fitted, as many of rock’s male fraternity that she picks off and spits out in a bloody heap and as many people as she continues to knock out of the way without a drop of respect like Neanderthal woman with a club and a guitar on her back, The Distillers will always just be nu-rock’s Hole and Brody Dalle (as she is for the moment at least) their own Courtney Love. Of that there is little dispute, the parallels are blow for blow frighteningly similar. That is no bad thing though when something this shockingly abrasive and irrefutable is the product.
And as Mrs Love-Cobain takes on the role of a Joan Collins in American alt-rock’s rated-R soap opera, that Ms Dalle has broken, entered and stolen the baton from her loose clutches is a very good thing indeed. We can’t all stay in and watch TV the whole time. ‘The Gallow Is God’ sees them bust in and ransack Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ in the first instance, heaving up close to the lens in bad light with bulging, bloodshot eyes and heavy lurching guitars. But that’s where the direct link really ends. Their foundation is more like Rancid or Operation Ivy with the ska siphoned off, with maybe a snatch of Husker Du thrown in for cohesion.
It’s the sort of thing the likes of Good Charlotte unsuccessfully (so unsuccessfully) aspire to. What a difference it makes kicking the lamentable frat-boy off the frontline. It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman though, such things don’t deserve to be distinguished in her world. She goes for them all, and takes them, righteously. When she sings, or rather vocally discharges, “tell me something, will I die on a rope?” (‘Die On A Rope’) you fear it’s those in the near vicinity that are dropping like flies.
‘Dismantle Me’, ‘Hall of Mirrors’ and the utterly blistering ‘Beat Your Heart Out’ are mangled guitar pop violently pulped into forms that barely resemble a pop song but can’t help being intrinsically just that. It’s like having such contempt for something that you can’t help but come full circle and out-do it on its own terms. It’s The Detroit Cobras with venom in excess. It’s The Bangles liquefied and recycled into a set of vigorously firing pistons. For the pop conspiracy theorists it just remains to be seen whether their next record morphs into chemically enhanced desert rock. She’s too strong though, you guess it could even be the other way around.