Press The Spacebar: The Wire Review, January 2005
Chicks On Speed & The No Heads
Press The Space Bar
CHICKS ON SPEED/HAUSMUSIK CDPress The Space Bar is billed as a defiant departure for the Berlin trio of Melissa Logan, Alex Murray-Leslie and Kiko [sic] Moorse, with hefty input from "The No Heads", aka producer Cristian Vogel and his No Heads group of Barcelona avant punk musos flown into Berlin. Whether Vogel was shipped in to rescue an already festering sonic stinkpile is not clear, but despite his best efforts this is an embarrassing and frequently cringe-inducing mess of gesture politics and radical chic(k). The Chicks' schtick manages to insult one's intelligence with improbably banal cliche on the superficiality of the fashion and cosmetic industries ("Ten Thousand Years", "Wax My Anus"), the evils of "Class War", it's "the most well run casino in the world"), and the drudgery of domestic chores ("The Household Song"). Their lyrics -- an undigested dog's breakfast of Chomsky and Naomi Klein, delivered with the subtlety of Michael Moore -- sound like complex ideas underwritten by committee to avoid sounding too pompous. The exception is "Mitte Bitte", a vivid anthem to the current influx of international art expats enjoying cheap rents and Euro Chic in a Stadt that's bankrott, but they plummet to an all-time low in "Class War", where Murray-Leslie alternately shouts "It doesn't exist and "It does exist!, continually failing to commit. In a career of empty gestures (including a pointless EP of B-52s covers), Chicks On Speed have delivered a supersized dollop of patronising sauce that even politically feels a year too late. This space bar leaves nothing but an empty hole.
Rob Young
Copyright © 2005 The Wire.
bacK to chicKs-o-graphy
