Daisy Chainsaw
Eleventeen

THE REVIEW

There are records that "open".

"Eleventeen" is a wide-open door into the perverse, psychotic, and degenerate world of Her Sick Sweetness Katie Jane Garside. In fact, it's she herself who spreads her legs (anyone familiar with the character knows that the image is metaphorical to a certain extent...) and shows you everything there is to see in that world. Things you never believed, even when you thought you'd seen everything or nearly so. And the reaction can be one of horror, but also of delight. The pleasure of letting yourself be seized, helpless, by these visceral sounds is pure pleasure. Noise, putridness, and nightmare. The deviant dreams of a degenerate child. To all this, the sound of Daisy Chainsaw resembled one of the most extreme things from the London underground of the early-'90s.

Katie Jane is a stateless person, she doesn't feel English and considers the sea her home. She lived on a boat for almost all her childhood and much of her teenage years. The rise and fall of the wave correspond to her more than the stability of the mainland. But to find her perfect artistic half, she had to wait until she met Crispin Gray, someone who also listened to Industrial and initially treated the six-string rather poorly but from which he drew monstrously sublime moans and distortions: the ideal punk soundtrack for a Mario Bava horror. Later, it was always him who followed her in Queenadreena - the next chapter, but years later, of the Garside story. Confused and adrift (and in the fumes of an increasingly wild mental delirium), Katie Jane donned the guise of a gothic doll devoted to somersaults on stage and various types of outbursts, a character detached from reality with a crown of flowers on her head and a rebellious mane worthy of an escapee from an asylum. She even impressed Courtney Love, who called her one of the first (true) "riot grrls" - although Katie Jane didn't recognize herself at all (and still doesn't) in that not insignificant label.

Hers was not the fury of a rebellious girl, but the visionary psychopathy of the possessed - which did reach the primordial essence of punk, but through that pathological and morbid relationship with death and the "dark side" of Rock, merging carnally with the protagonists of her worst nightmares and singing of horrible and devastated scenarios; "this world is strange and I feel sick," recites "I Feel Insane", and if that's not a declaration tell me what it is... The screams struggle to penetrate the wall of a pounding and ruthless guitar riff, rancid like spoiled milk; the voice sounds like someone trying to claw their way up from the bottom of a well. "Hope Your Dreams Come True" flirts with the coffin from the vampiric video interpreted by Our Dear, full of details from a gothic novel and gloomy imagery from an English castle: Katie Jane singing "I am your savior" over an electric and dark dance for witches is not to be trusted, and indeed - after a central part of (apparent) calm before madness - the instruments explode, swallowing every good (?) hope in the explosion.

There's a lot of garage reminiscent of the Stooges in pieces like "You Be My Friend" and "The Future Free", visceral to the point of leaving little room for imagination, but also (unexpected) acoustic blues in a brief and unusual "Natural Man", and the Luciferian rockabilly (the X transplanted to Albion, to hear them play...?) of "Pink Flower" - all mixed with echoes of early grunge Seattle, the filthiest and brutal one ("Love Your Money"). The tremendous beauty of Chainsaw is that all this found space within a record where the twisted hallucinations of "Use Me Use You" (freezing) and especially "Everything Is Weird"—which makes you think of the closing of a profane rite and probably plays the role of the Masterpiece - "tribal noise"...? Can you say that? Well, it's the definition that always spontaneously arose in me when listening to this last shard of delirium...

...mind you, not the last of Katie Jane's, who would still grab us by force and take us on sometimes bewildering paths (see the skeletal and "bucolic" folk of Ruby Throat). And who among MY female icons of Rock'n'Roll sits very, very high...