Death Valley Girls
Glow In The Dark

No way. Say what you will, but whatever you do, there is surely a woman who can do it better than you. You won't convince me otherwise, so don't even try, and do you want to know why? Because I like women. I mean, I really like them. Women, women, women... Find me something better in the world and I'll buy you drinks until you're too drunk to stand. Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I love this band from LA, California so much, one of the best psychedelic garage bands around and whose latest album, 'Glow In The Dark' (Burger Records), will surely be among the most beautiful novelties of the last solar year.

Death Valley Girls. They're rebellious, sexy, incredibly fantastic, and paranoid at the same time, schizophrenic and frenzied as if they were shot at the speed of light into cosmic space. If their previous record, 'Street Venom' (2014), was a very welcome mix of psichobilly acidity blended with garage blues and new wave sounds, this new record is somehow a kind of Ubik spray can where listening is nothing more than a burst of cosmic and lysergic punk psychedelia.

There are still, of course, strong connections to certain wave sounds. How can you not think of Siouxie Sioux, after all, when listening to 'Glow In The Dark' (the title-track), 'Horror Movie', 'Disco', 'Seis Seis Seis'. But the wave attitude is not the only content of the album. This is a garage music record and we are in Los Angeles, the city of Jeffrey Lee Pierce's Gun Club, whose blues ghost hovers among the notes of 'No Spell' and 'Summertime' and 'Death Valley Blues', hallucinated and visionary from the sound reverberation of Suicide's Martin Rev and Alan Vega. 'Pink Radiation', finally, is a sweet trip shot into space and has some meditative sounds and an approach typical of Spiritualized.

I have always considered punk-rock more of an attitude than a genre in itself. By the same token, thinking of a band composed mainly of women (the guitarist is actually a man, Larry Schemel, who is Patty's brother, drummer of the Hole from 1992 to 1998 and later also of Juliette and the Licks) inevitably brings to mind the underground punk hardcore movement of the 'Riot grrrl' which combined, both aesthetically and ideologically, feminist self-awareness with punk style and the tackling of political and social issues. And this, this connection, is something positive in an era where such topics are always relevant and worthy of discussion. But of course, there are many other contents in this record and in the intentions of this band. The Death Valley Girls describe themselves as a band of dystopian punk and the product of a lysergic scientific experiment resulting in a group of survivors from sexual slavery. Their favorite quote is taken directly from sexploitation, specifically from 'Switchblade Sisters' of 1975: 'Everybody should be in a gang.' So what are you waiting for? Move and find yours and, if possible, make sure it is largely composed of women.