Sex drive

Whatever. One little penis crammed in amid all the body parts and sexual imagery of Salt peter (Creation), Ruby's debut, wouldn't be so outrageous. One little penis is not exactly a fart in church to the woman who used to howl alongside the erotic holy hell of Silverfish in the late '80s/early '90s. She who once shrieked about having "28 million eggs in my throat." She of the old saw "Hips tits lips power" on Silverfish's 1992 Organ Fan (Creation).

"Tiny Meat" is a perfect terror of a song, the perfect balance of disdain and strength, the perfect introduction to Ruby. Not many songs come crashing out of the speakers the way "Tiny Meat" does. Or put such solid shape to romantic indecision: "Fit to burst I'm in love. No no no, you silly girl." Silverfish's monochrome roar foretold nothing of Ruby's taut emotion or diverse, delicious grooves. That's why Salt peter is such a jewel; expectations can't be dashed where there are none.

Nevertheless, there were hints. Rankine, who hails from a "wee town on the outskirts of Edinburgh," spent some time with industrial wisenheimers Pigface, singing on some of that band's more solemn, graceful numbers. The lovely, expressive voice on the gorgeous "Chikasaw" (from 1994's Notes from Thee Underground) was Rankine's. She redid "Chikasaw" for Salt peter, because, she says, "the music didn't suit the lyrics. It was too up, and big and kind of pompous. I like it, but I thought it could be done differently." Where she heard pomposity, others are just as likely to have been caught up in the sweeping melancholy of the number. "Carondelet" ("Chikasaw" on the Pigface version) is a flat, anemic footnote on Salt peter, the solitary slip-up.

The Ruby songwriting method (Rankine writes the material with Mark Walk, who also produced Salt peter) allows her voice and words the freedom to swoop and fly in ways not possible in either Pigface or Silverfish. Pigface put most of their weight into making funny collages with nice big beats. In Silverfish, too, the words were written around the music. The opposite is true of Ruby, where, says Rankine, "I write to some simple four-bar loop, and then we get rid of it and start writing the music around the vocals."

Something in the way Rankine juxtaposes stark dance rhythms and thorny tension beneath a blanket of yearning is enough to conjure thoughts of early Nine Inch Nails. She sees that comparison as wrongheaded, but there are parallels. Where NIN were Trent Reznor's baby, Ruby are essentially just Rankine and Walk. On tour Rankine brings in "friends of friends" to form a proper band. Like Pretty Hate Machine, Salt peter seethes with a bitterness that seems targeted toward a particular doer-of-evil; the "you" feels precise. Both albums are remarkable for their range and two-fisted grip on melody and disquietude. But where Trent's piss/vinegar stew has had a few years to reach room temperature, Ruby's is still icy raw.

Essence of Ruby can be found distilled in the lexicon lesson on the sleeve of Salt peter: "Revenge (revenj) n: A dish best served cold." "Too many things can be done in the heat of the moment that you'll regret afterward," Rankine says. "I came back to London and found out a few things that had been going on in my absence. Salt peter is my revenge. People that I had considered friends for a long time just turned out to be real shitheads."

Said shitheads are no doubt a target for the title gesture in "Flippin' tha Bird." "Flippin' " launches the disc, and Rankine launches "Flippin' " with a question: "Why can't I feel the things that I'm supposed to?" The backdrop is sparse, just a slow drum-bass arrangement; and her voice is less a complaint than a statement of fact. She does sound half-numb, and it's a suitably chilly entrée to the disc.

As sporting as it is to play around with Rankine-Reznor analogies, one gaping difference remains: Rankine's gender permeates everything she touches, unceremoniously. There was nothing stilted in her "Hips Tits Lips Power" call-to-arms, and there's nothing stilted when, on Salt peter's "Heidi," she intones "I can speak so softly because I hold so much power." Somewhere between "Hips" and "Heidi" Rankine learned the power of intricacy and restraint. In her songwriting, she says, "I don't like being obvious and up front. I try to convey some kind of aesthetic rather than telling somebody exactly what I think -- to create a certain kind of imagery that makes it a song, or to the point of making it some kind of poetry."

The poetry Rankine creates with "Heidi" is unsettling and creepy. When she sings "You'd put me in the ground" against a calm shuffle, the starkness of that scenario is offset by the way she damn well sounds in control of the situation. She surely wouldn't be the one who winds up as worm food. She also holds sway, to a point, in the voluptuous pulse of "Paraffin," about a guy who gets snared by the adhesive properties of a woman's vagina. In the end, the slug breaks loose and all the woman's left with is the stink of sex. But at least she tried.

Ass. Neck. Head. Heart. Hand. Spine. Eye. Crack. Rankine's writing is crammed with body parts, or the suggestion thereof. All that flesh-and-gutsiness fills Ruby's songs with a lustiness beyond the sultry dance rhythms. "Body parts just sound great," she says. "And they create great imagery. I always like to write really physically. Especially when I haven't got anything in my mind that I particularly want to write about."

Those bodily images, paired with a guitar-drum combo pressed in frantic knots, give "Pine" enough tension and dread to recall the Pixies in their broken-bones-and-eyeball-slicing heyday. Midway through it stops dead, only to have Rankine suck in a lungful of air and get scary all over again: "I picked this pine/Stuck in my side/I've made my head/And there I'll hide." Like any good nightmare, "Pine" uncages demons that are difficult to define.

Salt peter's demons do make a point of hovering in mysterious forms; the foe sometimes seems as much internal as external. In "Hoops," Rankine offers the threat/boast, "You've never seen what I could do/Like run a mile and jump hoops, too." The spirit of "Hips Tits Lips Power" has remodeled itself into something more intricate.

In conversation, Rankine is less equivocal about gender. "Today is not the day to be banging your head against a brick wall if you're a woman. Today is the day to just get the fuck on with it. There will be a lot of people that try and stop you from doing what you want to do, and you just have to be totally blinkered and totally belligerent.

"I think women have spent too long concerning themselves with what men are doing. We were taught that it was the most important thing in our life to have a man, and it's not. It's bullshit. The most important thing in our life is to have us. I kind of like talking about what I think about it."

So how do men respond to her? Does she get boy groupies? "Yeah, I suppose, but I think groupie is a condescending, insulting term. Some people I would call groupies, I suppose, but most people are just fans."

Perhaps she's so levelheaded because she's a rock singer by happenstance. Fine art was her original ambition; she was at college "making books and taking photos" when Silverfish got organized. "If I had enough time I would do as much painting and photography as I do music." For now, designing the artwork for her discs has to suffice. She painted album covers for Silverfish, and she conceived the abstractions for Salt peter.

Incidentally, saltpeter is a chemical used to manufacture dynamite. It's also used in prisons and the military to suppress the male libido. To pickle meat, tiny and otherwise. Rankine happened to hear the term tossed about more than once in a single day. "I think it's just kinda funny. It immediately appealed to my sense of humor when I found out what it meant."

And if the disc takes off into the sales stratosphere, how will she react? "Oh God, I don't know. I think I'd probably go insane and then go and become a hermit on top of a mountain somewhere."

Once there, she could always open a meat-pickling business.

Ruby play with Schtum at the Paradise on Tuesday, April 23. Call 931-2000.