Picasso on Paper
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Customer Review: Big Noisy Fish With Go-Faster Racing Stripes.
Raging, chanting refrains of Jolene! Jolene! start off. But Lo-fi Tennessee is no Dolly Parton song. From the exploding, cascading entry, you know you’re outside the realms of Celine Dion’s aromatherapy clinic; outside in the garbage cans more like, for this is scum rock - raw, aggressive, dangerous in a way many of the current punk\thrash bands can only masturbate over being. There’s always a sense with the best of punk of expecting the unexpected and wanting to be dragged up out the barcalounger to jump about the room like a ferret’s down your pants. Picasso Trigger deliver this. The sound is uniquely noisy, whirry, jangly, disjointed and buzzy - much like being in the mosh-pit at a gig, but it’s not boring like a lot of ultra-speed thrash metal. The chainsaw guitar is modulated. The drums aren’t just whump-whump-whumped, but patterned into distinct tempoes. It’s like Gene Krupa on acid at times; particularly on Anti’d where you feel the sticks jumping up off each beat on the snares like living animals. What T’aint consists of is like a mutant cross between Bikini Kill and Black Flag stuffed through a liquidizer and poured out into the punk anima-bag with a mix of menace, rage and good-humour in a manner that marks it as born from genuine desire, not some slick marketing ploy. Too many punk bands of the nineties have been overdosed on Nirvana and suck up to Cobain’s nightmares, rhythms and song structuring. Picasso Trigger hark back to earlier days and remind me a bit of the Dicks in their arrangement of the tunes’ dynamics in the way the songs veer from trash and thrash to swaggering meat beats. On each track Lisa Cooper’s guitar pulverizes the chords to a mesh of white noise over pummelling almost tribal drumming, whilst Sam Mintu’s heaping bass hurtles and beats about the bushy parameters of noise, driving onward and keeping it all together, rounding up the mess into a whole. Kathy Poindexter shrieks and shouts, keeping things urgent, even popping a few trombone blasts in on Kiss Me Where it Counts. Red-Headed Retard particularly is like someone pulling a gun in your face. It’s that scary. Energetic and enthusiastic, this is young music for young people and it comes up right out of the gutters. Smell the sweat, feel the heat, drink up the beer, thrill to the adrenaline buzz of four people smashing living daylights out of their instruments. Cool! Amazingly, like early Husker Du or Flipper, after a period of adjustment, it’s clear there are intricacies to the music and even hummable tunes hiding under the distortion and chaos. Once you pick up on them, you’re hooked. Hanging right on the edge of the maelstrom at times, this is ideal music to take to boring parties and pub discos to pep things up a bit. Standout tracks here are Lo-Fi Tennessee, where “love is a butterfly” and 455. Oh, and Kiss Me Where it Counts, a mordant, and by PT’s standards, beautiful love thang. Kathy, you can kiss me anytime you big bag of fun-ful fury you… T’aint’s not the best by Picasso Trigger, but now they’ve split, potential unfulfilled, you’re not going to see them providing soundtrack for the next Pepsi commercial so get what you can of them. They knew that big stadium rock of U2 proportions was a boring waste of time for middle-class losers anyway, and never pandered to the rock critics, big studio bosses and radio stations - or if they wanted to, they messed up big time. They did their own thing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. As far as bounce, guts and a sound to knock stuffing out of those nice new Mission speakers, you wont find much like them. I, for one, will miss not hearing a third LP. If they’d just learned to rein it in, they coulda been contenders… For a fiver, you can’t go wrong and if you like T’aint, check out Bipolar Cowboy, Fire In The Hole (both LPs) from Alias and Plutonium (4 track EP) from Jettison.
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Proudhon, Marx, Picasso
Life?s tough when you?re the daughter of the world?s most famous painter. What?s a girl to do? We know, create exquisite jewellery for Tiffany?s and come up with a signature fragrance that?s as exotic and classy as you are. Do you know what? That?s exactly what Paloma?s done. She must be psychic. Palomas signature scent was launched in 1984 as a stylish mossy fragrance for women.
Are you quick on the draw? Even harder, can you put a title to someone else’s masterpiece? 
