penelope.net presents:
She Mob
Cancel The Wedding
(1999) Spinster Playtime Records 17 tracks $11 CD
As with such modest, cutting 1980s U.K. punk combos as Delta 5, women singing like people having real conversations. Increasingly funny, vehement, distracted conversations. For example, "Why did I become a teacher? Why did I become a teacher?" For all the right reasons, but --
Greil Marcus - Real Life Rock Top 10 Aug 1999
This San Francisco quartet tack on some dub ("Smoke Ring Day") at the end of Cancel the
Wedding, their very Slits-like debut disc. And there are echoes of the Raincoats in the sound of
Diane Wallis's sawed violin. But it's the savvy yet humble tone of Wallis's singing (not to mention
Sue Hutchinson's growl) that marks She Mob as great inheritors of the Rough Trade grrrl-punk
spirit of the late '70s. As with the she mobs of old, that tone in the voices of the songs' subjects -- a
friend from the Midwest (who gulps "Prozac"), "Emily" (who never ventures into town), "Mrs.
Idey" (who drives off too far outside it) -- leaves you wondering whether they're being praised as
rebels or ridiculed as hopeless cases. Perhaps because these grrrls are already in their 30s, they sing
from a moral center that bespeaks corny old experience. Sometimes their perspective yields surreal
refrains, like the understated observation "There has been a big mistake" in the song where a puppy
morphs into a man. And sometimes She Mob sound downright revolutionary, as in the remarkable
"Teacher," which reveals that students aren't the only ones who long for the day school's out
forever. -- Kevin John
Tracks:
Prozac
Soul Mate
When You Go Away
I Took The $
Emily
Puppy
Luge
Teacher
Fog
Pretty
I Don't Know
I'm Lost
Melvin
I Tried
Smoke Ring Day
Queen Of Doom
Mrs. Idey
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