BITCH ALERT!

Loyal Black Houses readers (ha!), I present to you: Music from the near-future that sounds like it’s from the near-past! If you’ve visited Europe recently or read Vice Magazine, then you know that the whole dang continent is really into grunge right now. Yeah, I know. It’s weird.

Bitch Alert is a two-girls-and-a-guy power trio that recreates the early 90’s with hilarious accuracy, and right now they’re FUCKING HUGE in their native Finland. Their official site is full of asinine non-descriptions like “loud, fuzzy, angry rock music yet full of pop hooks,” which sounds a lot better from a PR standpoint than “we sound exactly like Babes in Toyland.”

There’s nothing wrong with being revivalists, but when your sound is this (bear with me – I swear I’m not trying to bash them!) derivative, it puts greater-than-usual pressure on the songwriting. Ever heard any of those Chinese punk bands that sound exactly like Operation Ivy? Brain Failure? Anarchy Jerks? hello?… anyone? I think it’s cool that they’re raging against the communist machine and all, but the problem with those bands is that they end up sounding like… a shitty version of Operation Ivy. Luckily, THESE bitches weren’t lying about the pop hooks. “Kill Your Darlings,” the album that this track came from, plays like the long-lost stepsister of Hole’s “Live Through This.” Bitch Alert play these songs with such passion that they actually sell throwback lyrics like “you make me so scared of myself” and “Jesus would like to ride my bike.” It’s the kind of thing that should make Kim Shattuck proud and Billy Corgan jealous, and it kicks the living shit out of Saliva Seether.

If you’re a Hives fan, you know that the mechanisms that bring Scandinavian bands to the masses can move slooooooowly (compare the discography on Bitch Alert’s English language site to the one on the Finnish one) , so you’ve got a good year or two to pass this track on to your hipster friends and claim it’s a radio hit from 1993 that only you remember – you are SO cool.

Trags


Fetch the tune:

Late Night Lullaby

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CORRECTION: Okay, while i do believe that Bitch Alert's grunge
revivalism beats the shit out of Saliva's southern rock revivalism,
the band I was actually thinking of was Seether. You know, the band
with the single that sounds like Nirvana ("Remedy") and who
inexplicably seem to have taken their name from a Veruca Salt song.
ROOKIE MISTAKE.