Lydia Lunch: Big Sexy Noise

An interesting life, you cannot claim that Lydia Koch hasn't had one of these. Now aged 50, she has teetered on the edge of insanity, taken sexual partners from both sides of the gender divide, performed sex-acts for film, dallied with substance abuse, and then there's her friends.

J. G. Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, Billy Ver Plank, Steven Severin, Robert Quine, Sadie Mae, Rowland S. Howard, Michael Gira, The Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, Die Haut, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez: all stalwarts of the No-Wave music scene are located somewhere in her address book, and as you may have gathered, she's no slouch in the artistic department herself.

We're not even going to attempt to count how many albums this lady has been a part of. It would only result in us throwing our abacus at the nearest child before screaming "I don't want your smeggin' calculator!". Let's just settle on 'a lot'.

This goes some way to explain the odd tone set in the album. Koch's vocals never quite seem to fit over the music being played. Whether it be by production or by performance, it carries the aura of someone in a separate room singing along to an experimental jam-session next door. Additionally this is exactly the impression which the instruments at play convey, a group of musicians trying out new things to entertain each other, not necessarily aimed at an outside audience.

Not that the 5-note bass-line from "Gospel Singer" isn't entertaining, but stretched over a whole three minutes with a screeching sax trying its best to sound discordant overhead, the result is perhaps something which sounds good in a rehearsal room, would have likely worked fantastically as one part of a song, yet is nowhere near developed enough to justify a starring/sole role in its own song.

Handling other people's material, the results are much more sanitary. Lou Reed's "Kill Your Sons" gets the Lydia Lunch treatment as she injects menace into the vocal delivery of the verses before losing the game to pantomime slightly in the chorus. We cannot help but envision Marge Simpson in front of a microphone at various occasions.

The lyrics are exactly what you would expect, an account of life on the other side of the tracks ("No more trysts in the middle of the night / Don't call me on the phone when you wanna start a fight / Don't tap on my window, don't pound on my door / I'm changing all the locks 'cause love don't live here anymore" - 'Another Man Comin'). For such reasons, many have compared Koch to Nick Cave, proclaiming her to be "the female incarnation of...". It's by no means a bad judgement, the scuzzy blues backing, the words dripping in sex and violence.

Alas, for those choosing this album to be their insertion point, they will find the comparison slight wide-of-the-mark, given that Koch lacks Cave's cohesive approach and sensitivity to the listener. You could, of course, do much worse.