Crunt

CRUNT: “Crunt” (Trance Syndicate)/16: “Curves That Kick”(Southern)/ EGGS: “Eggs Teenbeat 96 Explorer” (Southern)

Crunt contain Babes In Toyland’s Kat Bjelland-Gray. She’s ‘Gray’ now because she married Crunt guitarist Stuart Gray. She’s not left Babes In Toyland, so we are told. They will be recording a follow-up to Painkillers sometime this year, so the word goes. Let’s hope so.

This album sounds old and grey. It mixes Rolling Stones riffs with Iggy Pop vocals and goes nowhere with a slouching pace. It is listenable but after having listened to it you ask yourself, what’s the point? Bjelland plays bass and sings on one of the unremarkable songs. Otherwise, this is very much Gray’s baby. A musical divorce is in order.

16 are young and angry. Well, they sound young anyway. They have done a remarkable thing with the vocals. They have managed to make them sound like distorted guitars. In fact, they have managed to fuzz them up so much and mix them so low that if there was a Nobel prize for deciphering lyrics, anyone who managed to figure out a full line from this album would get it hands down.

Musically, 16 are OK. Hailing from Orange County, California, they sound heavy, abused and hardcorish. They probably have loads of attitude and are nice fellas, but with song titles like ‘Mr Mouse’ and ‘Joe The Cat’, how exactly do they expect anyone to take them seriously?

If it’s hard to take 16 seriously, it’s nothing to what you have to do to even listen to the Eggs album from start to finish. This album is 66 minutes 17 seconds long, which is 66 minutes too long in my opinion. Oh woeful!

Eggs are from Virginia and they sing lines like, “Someone who can’t understand the ins and outs of indie pop.” They rip off and destroy every pop melody known to gobshites. They experiment in the absolutely worst possible art-college shite way. They have a song called ‘Minestrone,’ for jaysus sake, which in tortuous squeaks goes: “Minestrone, minestrone/With beans/Hot dog.” This whole album is so bad it’s atrocious. It’s so atrocious it’s unbelievable. It’s so unbelievable I wish I never heard it.

• Gerry McGovern