Spanked Purple

Whoo-wee, looks like we got ourselves some real crosspatches here! Looks like someone needs to go back to that gosh-darned kitchen before hubby gets home from a hard day at work.

Vomit my heart
Pull my head apart
Vomit my heart
Pull my legs apart

I loved Babes In Toyland, really loved them.  It all started with seeing a review for Spanking Machine, their debut LP, in NME in 1990.  I can’t remember a word of it but I clocked the band name and LP title* and just filed the cover away in my head for a time when I was ready for it, because I sure as shit wasn’t ready for them then.

Babes In Toyland always get reviewed the same way – angry chicks, who made a lot of noise, Courtney Love was in them/rehearsed with them for a little bit then stole most of their ideas for her Hole.  They were way better than that**.

Busting out of Minneapolis, Babes In Toyland scrapped and fought their way clear to recording Spanking Machine in Seattle with producer Jack Endino, who it has to be said did a fine job here. We get 36 minutes and 11 tracks of dangerously wired, uncompromising and aggressive chaos here, riffs cut and/or bubble to the surface, the rhythm section thrash and chug and above it all Kat Bjelland’s voice drives it all, shrieking and/or dead-eyed monotone, often interchangeable in the same song.  I love how Babes In Toyland refuse to be in thrall to expected structures and punk rock tropes, it makes them sound genuinely subversive.  

My tip for listening is just abandon yourself to it, stop trying to grasp for your usual structures and patterns on the bank and just let yourself be carried downstream.  

He's my thing
Stay away from my thing
Why don't you get your own one around?
Well, he's my thing

For a metal fan the big obvious hitters on Spanking Machine are ‘He’s My Thing’ and ‘Dust Cake Boy’.  The former is a superb swaggering objectification of a dude lucky/unlucky enough to be owned by the Babes – it sounds a scary prospect, I love the pummelling rhythm section and the sheer balls of it.  ‘Dust Cake Boy’ … well good luck to you picking a narrative out of that one, musically it’s the aural equivalent of holding the back of your hand to a candle just for shits and giggles.  Kat Bjelland sounds like a creature on both these tracks, channelling mania and menace like nobody else could.

(okay so this is a re-recorded version, but hey, deal with it and don’t let the dolls keep you awake at night)

Once you get your ears in for Spanking Machine there is so much more here than stomping grunge punk.  Take the Charlie Manson referencing ‘Swamp Pussy’ with that mutated Duane Eddy rhino stomp that owes a sight more to the Cramps than anything more Seattle-fied.  Staying on the animal tip, ‘Dogg’ is a great mutant swamp blues, gasoline and fire meeting and getting on just great thank you very much.  ‘Dogg’ conjures a harder less spectral Gun Club for our delectation.

Elsewhere the wonky ‘You’re Right’ puts me in mind of Dead Kennedys when they used to go all wobbly from time to time, all changing time signatures and vocal lines where you don’t expect to find them, before the Babes start to stomp again.  Ditto actually on the stop/start charging ‘Boto (w)rap’.

John Peel declared Spanking Machine to be his favourite album of 1990, I’m not quite with the old saint on that front.  For every track like the excoriating ‘Lashes’, again good luck working that one out, there’s a ‘Pain In My Heart’ or ‘Fork Down Throat’ that feels unpleasantly like being hit with the wrong side of the machete, it can be a little like being forced to sit in on someone else’s therapy.

Mostly though Spanking Machine is just great.  I love how bracingly uncompromising Babes In Toyland were, how they produced something uniquely theirs, compared to the bands they always got compared to, they were less rock than L7, less loony chick than the Lunachicks and far broader than the riot grrrl bands.  How lazy and insulting is it for the music press to have continually compared them to other female bands? homogenous genitals do not a homogenous scene make, as I believe Andrew Marvell wrote.

Babes In Toyland felt then and still feel a bit feral, dangerous and unbroken.  The band had big identifiable personalities – Kat Bjelland is a great frontwoman, the whole Rhoda Penmark on asylum-day-release didn’t just feel like a schtick, it felt real; Michelle Leon and Lori Barbero were no shrinking violets either, not many drummers dominate a stage like Barbero does.  Babes In Toyland had the air of a pack about them, more than a band.  Spanking Machine, despite the rage and angst and oddness, feels fun too, lots of joy and pride being taken from things being pushed as far as they could, all needles in the red.

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The excellent cover image was shot by Daniel Corrigan, Minneapolis scene photographer extraordinaire^ and is a timely reminder that, clowns aside, there is nothing odder, creepier and scarier than dolls.  Flip it over and we get … a scary clown! yay.

They only pressed up approximately 350 copies on purple vinyl, apparently to use up all the cardboard sleeves they had printed up.  It’s a good pressing and surprisingly cheap still, maybe the collector boys are still a bit frightened of these weird sisters.  Rightly so.

1014 Down.

PS: It’s not on this LP, but I love the 60’s vibe of this track:

PPS:  This is also good and dates from around the time I saw them live. Lori rocks.

*taken from an episode of Leave It To Beaver.

**way better than Hole too, genuinely disturbed and creative.

^most famous for the ‘Mats Let It be cover.