Review Summary: Feminist nu-metal.
There's an inherent problem in trying to imitate
Rage Against the Machine's blind, flippant anger, especially in your first outing as a band. Can you make yourself sound angry enough, or, moreover, that you actually have something to be angry about? The thing about political rock is that if you stand for something, chances are that the other promoters of the message you stand for usually won't use your song as an anthem for their message, if you have something valid to say. What you get out of this album, after the female rapper/screamer chick
Tairrie B hammers it into your head, is as much mindless, left-wing feminist rhetoric as RATM is mindless leftist rhetoric in general standing. The advantage here is that this band at least is retarded with a clearer aim.
It's not that all of the positions are invalid: being pro-choice, for example, is good, but try to write a song about it that isn't, well, retarded. This band's pro-choice song is called "Put Your Head Out", and opens with the line: "My pussy, my choice." The other thing is, when the band doesn't try to make good points stupidly, it doesn't seem to exist within the realm of reality.
According to "Down" (featuring Lynn Strait, the singer of a better band,
Snot), we apparently don't have health care. I'm wondering what country this band was living in when they wrote this, since, in 1996, and is still true today, if you're sick, you can go into a hospital and pay them to take care of you, if you can afford to do it, which is probably not true if you're lazy, deadbeat clowns...oh. Hi, lazy, deadbeat clowns.
We've thoroughly exhausted what the band
says. The angry white chick is backed up by blasts of ragged, '90s rock/punk/metal that, like RATM, is vaguely nu-metalish, but not quite. The drums have the same sound as
Metallica's
St. Anger. It's a dirty, sludgy-sounding album defined solely by how dumb it is, with the vocalist, who had once served as a protegee of Eazy-E, is the most memorable member of the band, by way of the fact that the musicians are so unmemorable.
Band was named "Manhole" at the time of this release, then changed to "Tura Satana" to avoid confusion with another band. Tura Satana is a tribute to the star of
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - I think the real Tura deserves a better band. That being said, the band's second album,
Relief Without Release, is more distinctive than this; still kind of existing lyrically within the feminist message but moving toward more of a female impersonation of
Marilyn Manson, with anti-religion themes. It's still dumb. For those of you who can't afford to buy both albums, live versions of some of the better tracks appear as bonuses here. "Dry" is kind of catchy.
