*** Matrimony

KITTY FINGER

(Kill Rock Stars)

This is the great lost riot grrrl album, released by a young mostly female (they had a boy drummer) band from Sydney in 1989. Not many heard it back then, but Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna took note and pushed for this reissue on the Olympia indie Kill Rock Stars.

It's easy to hear why: Matrimony favor the same raw combination of confrontational vocals, snarling guitars, and driving punk rhythms that powers Bikini Kill. They also dip into the hypnotic jangle of Beat Happening, and they owe a debt to Lydia Lunch's New York school of dark humor and sexually explicit lyrical content. Which makes Kitty Finger something of a late-'80s bridge between the pioneering feminist punk of the Slits and Lunch and the cock-cutting posture of Bikini Kill (not to mention Babes in Toyland, Hole, etc.). This CD also features the best song about frozen cadavers since the Freeze's "Refrigerator Heaven."

-- Joe S. Harrington