Girls Against Boys
Venus Luxure no.1 Baby

An oxidized and corroded metal cable, swinging at a very low frequency, generating irregular and distorted waveforms, dark underground vibrations... a cable that starts from Killing Joke, Flipper, Swans, Big Black, proceeds in the '90s towards Cop Shoot Cop and Unsane to connect with Washington's Girls Against Boys, a Darwinian evolution of the hardcore combo Soulside. Hardcore here (much more than in the previous, erratic debut "Tropic of Scorpio") is firmly grasped by the neck, hydraulically compressed and then discharged into the darkest tunnels underground, where it decelerates without losing a single watt of its immense power which, intact, continues to explode but without flame, like in a chamber where a vacuum has been created. A superbly evolved, transfigured form of hardcore, definitively post.

What remains of hardcore is the metal, poured in layers starting from the bottom, with two basses often paired (one a leaden rusty blanket, the other in continuous motion) to then rise to the surface with rough samplings and distorted guitar abrasions; its scream is also retained, often filtered through worn electronic circuits, which now struggles in a nightmare ("....I shattered my bones just to come back, I collapsed my mind just to come back, let me come back, (what a) crazy thing..." "Let Me Come Back") or suffocates in a wicked hiss ("...whatever you do from now on I hope you don't have fun, whatever you do when I'm gone I hope you don't have fun...." "Satin Down") or again, evokes psychotic delusions ("...in a madhouse, lay me down in a madhouse, I'm all spun out in a dreamboat, Sally dear, they're coming to get me from the madhouse..." "Bug House").

The GVsB skillfully lead their powerful half-track with thousands of HP in "Venus Luxure no.1 Baby": they skillfully vary driving style (tracks forged on heavily armored riffs are accompanied by others mostly based on the classic song form, growling as befits, but sometimes lightened by surprising pop micro-injections), they change cruising speed (the basic midtempo collapses on several occasions into ruinous ultraslow) until they spin the engine at maximum torque in the deadly one-two punch of "Bullet Proof Cupid" and "Seven Seas" where the interplay of vocal and instrumental reverberations produces the effect of images rushing past the window of a moving train through ruined industrial landscapes.

Their music is strongly imaginative, not coincidentally included multiple times in film soundtracks. It’s also not a coincidence that GVsB have often played "Venus Luxure no.1: Baby" in its entirety in concerts, considering it a unified work and the best emblem of their sound. Ultimately "Venus Luxure..." is a dense mixture of dark matter yet easily assimilable, granitically compact but not monotonous; in a word, wholesome... like a breath of methane gas.

(Ps: thanks to Alice and Matteo for the help in translating the lyrics)