Little Claw – “Prickly Pear” b/w “Crawl Around Inside” 7” (Columbus Discount)
If you’re going to teeter on the edge of falling apart, there had better be some charm to the flimsy glue holding things together. Tuneless, obnoxious caterwaul may pass for charm while the garage-punk scene finally makes it around to exporting/appropriating poorly-executed femme-folk-“damage” with a major focus on trying way too hard or cultivating aggressive leg hair rather than accomplishing the most rudimentary of songwriting skills. But the reasonable among us must hope that this won’t pass for anything but a semi-hearty laugh one, maybe two, years down the road. Like Nobunny, this is another entity that makes me feel as though I just found the box of sunglasses in “They Live.” What’s “catchy” and “brilliant” or “hilarious” is little more than sub-skiffle TV-jingle melodies coming from a guy in his underwear and a rabbit mask with mid-‘90s rejected-by-Estrus, eyeball-poppin’/boner-pants Fake Daddy Roth cover art. With Little Claw, I’m going to guess with a measure of confidence that lofty accolades are reserved for what’s really the ghost-of-Dame Darcy-past envisioned by a CocoRosie fan holding Joanna Newsom hostage and forcing her to play an out-of-tune acoustic bass with her knees and elbows while a contact mic is stuck in the throat of a really fat housecat as it’s being slowly bathed. Cream yellow vinyl, edition of 250, Columbus Discount Singles Club Year One release. (http://www.columbusdiscountrecords.com)
(Andrew Earles)
