- It’s been quite some time since we’ve taken a spray from the nozzle that spewed the ‘80’s pop-industrial-no-wave detritus of Brisbane cool-kids Bitchratch. I think they broke up somewhere there? You can’t keep a fashionably bored type down though and the ‘ratch’s Lizzie Plisken is back (she escaped from Brisbane?) and she sounds even more DIY than before. In fact it doesn’t get much more do-it-yourself (or blatantly honest) than a record sleeve that reads “Lizzie, mostly everything, garageband, drums.”
Assuming that, -out by herself, for the first time- she wasn’t overly influenced by Apple’s presets, Plisken is demonstrating a predilection for the pop part of Bitchratch’s music recipe. Through all the reverb, her little collection of electro-pop is a melancholy record of love-on-the-rocks and is the more moving because it sounds like a degraded vhs recording of an early ‘80’s MTV broadcast; a snatch of feeling, nearly lost to time.
It’s difficult to think of exactly which of the era’s divas Plissken is channeling: her crooning is whispery and quiet, this is no Dion, Ross or -acknowledged favourite of Bitchratch- Brannigan. It does have more in common with the slightly smaller voices of Debbie Harry, Madonna or perhaps Berlin’s Terri Nun. Or maybe it’s just the similarly sophisticated electro-pop they made that brings them to my mind. For all that the production values here are bargain basement, there are ghostly stylish pop tunes lurking inside it. Finally, Plisken’s vocal sound may be difficult to pin down, because with its quiet, hooded vowels, it is actually -and this is a real compliment- its own thing.
Lux Tax leaves behind so much of the no-wave aural terrorism of Bitchratch, but, more subtly, still holds on to the irony and ennui that Lizzie Plisken has always had in spades. That’s largely a production affectation and it’s the more surprising that, underneath it, are authentic pop tunes from another era, filled with sincere feelings of loss and yearning and, finally a sense of female empowerment that is contemporary and powerful. With Lux Tax, Lizzie Plisken may be drinking from a cup of suffering, but that bitter draught really has allowed her to escape, to a place that feels and sounds good.
- Chris Cobcroft.