- What the hell happened to Glitoris? I’ve always had a soft spot for the yelly, Canberra punks, but on the strength of their 2016 EP, The Disgrace, I had them pegged as … gimmicky fun? A good political fist-pump but not musically essential? Even back then, however, if you spent the time and listened to the six structurally acrobatically transformative minutes of The Pole up the end of the EP, rather than the tinny, sub-two-minute banger Paradise at the beginning, you would have some idea of what these four women are capable of.
Come 2018 and Glitoris’ debut album leaves you in little doubt that there’s a whole lot going on under the hood. I still find descriptions like Led Zep meets Rammstein or Rage Against The Machine fronted by Peaches make me want to claw my own face off, but … there’s just the tiniest nugget of truth in there. The larger truth is that Glitoris are able to go all over the musical place and now do so at every opportunity. Punk rubs shoulders with glam, metal, pub rock, power-pop, prog and symphonic rock. That makes Glitoris clever but not necessarily entertaining, especially when you factor in their unwavering commitment to hard-left-wing, feminist politics.
Glitoris solve the musical side of the problem by always meeting in the middle, deftly drawing all of the musical threads into a muscular, power-pop knot that's eminently listenable. It’s a real tribute to the band how seamlessly they transition, for instance, from the orchestral rock of The Policy, through the pub-rock stomp of Licks & Politics, the punk / close-harmony meld of The Executioner and on into the heavy thunder of Spit Hood. The diversity keeps you engaged without jolting you uncomfortably through a million, sharp, musical left-turns.
Politically it’s a similar story: you may be too easy being entertained to notice the ideological browbeating. The indoctrination on topics from gender inequality to criminal justice, human rights, political apathy and sexual entitlement is a constant across the record. That’s just my kind of thing, but still, even if you like both Angry Anderson’s music and his politics, you may well not be able to stop yourself from having a really good time here.
Glitoris’ debut is a real step up, one that opens up all sorts of possibilities. It’s not at all surprising they’ve been touring with Regurgitator, another band that took a cavalcade of musical styles and a few political jabs and transformed them into perfect power-pop and a durable career. Even if bands like Cable Ties and Camp Cope hadn’t put the politics right back into alt-rock, I think Glitoris could’ve given it a red hot go and they make it more fun than the rest of them put together.
- Chris Cobcroft.