Review Summary: All the energy in the world can’t hide how lazy this feels
Amyl and the Sniffers meets Idles is about the size of this package, except it’s not as fun as the former and not as clever as the latter. Give each song ten seconds and you know what the rest of it’s going to sound like, put 3 minutes into the album and you’ve got the whole picture. The sloganeering’s about as puerile as it gets; the intention of course isn’t to be actually funny, the intention is that you laugh because you get the joke. But when every track is built around the same barked-out buzzwords and hammer-to-the-skull delivery, the joke wears thin fast. It’s punk rock as meme culture: all surface, no subversion, an endless loop of shouting the same punchline until it loses all meaning.
If Lambrini Girls have a bright spot it’s the undeniable energy of their attack. This band is loud, this band is furious, this band has all the righteous indignation in the world. The riffs have a delightful crunch to them, a roaring garage-rock quality that is the lifeblood of most of this album and Phoebe Lunny is a sufficiently and effectively strident blaze of vitality in her attack. If I’d stuck to just a listen or two of Bad Apple or No Homo, I’d be tempted to think this was a good album. But underneath the fight-montage attack, the songwriting feels about as lazy as it can possibly get. I’m not looking for math-rock bridges or string sections in my garage band or anything, but there’s a difference between walking down a well-trod path and wallowing.
The intention of the lyrics is to be confrontational, blunt and if I have to read the word “unapologetic” in connection with this kind of thing one more time I’m going to scream. The gamut of subjects is run through multiple times over: workplace sexism, gentrification, body standards, all worthy subjects expounded on in the most brain dead manner possible. All the lyrics attempt to appropriate the terminology of the terminally online in a manner that already feels dated and will no doubt be more wince-inducing as the years go by. Lambrini Girls seem to think that speaking in the terms of someone with a severe head injury equates to blunt confrontation. Listen to Eve Libertine and Joy de Vivre for just a minute, just sixty seconds worth of time and you’ll find all the confrontation of Lambrini Girls with a wit and inciveness that this band has zero grasp of. Shout out that bad things are bad all you want, no discourse, no plan, no action, just keep convincing yourself you’re radical because you know you’re on the right side and you’re able to yell it repeatedly.
Reading the definition of “gentrification” from a dictionary doesn’t really stick it to the man as much as Lambrini Girls seem to think. Nor is it in any sense clever or inspiring towards…anything. Maybe it’s a move that just lays bare the paper-thin posturing of punk rock. If so, it’s a message that’s about 50 years late and one Lambrini Girls obviously didn’t intend. What’s left is an album that desperately wants to be a rallying cry but feels more like an echo chamber—conflating self-congratulation with rebellion, and believing that having the right opinion loud enough is a substitute for having something to say.