L7
The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum

THE REVIEW

It’s difficult to say which might be the best album from these ladies because from their beginnings to here (1997), they have always added an intelligent dose of noise to the mixture from which CDs are physically made.

The surprise this time is that they hit the right note, managing to bring some order among the ideas and produce an album as soft as a kick in the middle of the spine. With all the ensuing consequences. To be intelligent, they must have done something good. What? First of all, in this album, there’s pop that’s neither mushy nor thrown together haphazardly as one might think. The most easy listening tracks still have an underlying anxiety that makes you say pop, yes, but nothing commercial. The adolescent mental ramblings have been discarded, and the recycling tastes like an American girl thrown on the street who has put on lipstick in concentric circles all over her face and has something to sing in her state of utmost clarity: drunkenness.

In this album, there is also metal that, more or less, is as heavy as a Cambiasso goal in recent times. In short, if you catch them on the right track, you find the one who sings enjoying playing the electric guitar by plucking the vocal cords and the electric guitars are angry for the affront suffered. Drums and bass hit like a waxing on Jon Bon Jovi’s chest, and the result is that if you want to ask existential questions, it’s not exactly the right moment. You would risk finding the right answers and then have no choice but to go to the port, find the moral strength to lift a concrete block and attach it to the noose to end it all.

In this album, there’s naturally also punk, as gentle as Lemmy in the morning finding himself next to, just awake, a Moby Dick-sized groupie with the equipment. Discs flying like few women in rock history, our ladies prove to have chest hair and to stir up quite some pogo. But it’s a nasty, dark punk that looks at you sideways and threatens to use the club at every misstep.

Finally, in this album, there’s grunge, because whether you like it or not, they're 90s Americans, and thus they must engage in mental masturbations too, even fooling around and writing the lyrics of a song listing the names of three girls (Lorenza, Giada, Alessandra, they seem tricolor) repeated in a loop so much that it makes it easy to think that Screaming Trees are a better torture for you, poor glamster who was bound to get a kick in the ass from this stuff anyway.

Meritorious notes to the intro (proof of how the voice wants to overpower the guitars), to “Drama” pre-2000 hard rock, “I Need” anxiety-inducing for rave pills, and “Moonshine” erotic pop-mockery with sharp claws. The other tracks are also worth it, but these, if you seek them out, can frame the release well.