Straight away I have to come clean and admit that this mini album is a few years old now but only a recent discovery for me after experiencing several exhilarating live performance.  Not owning this release until now ultimately is several years my loss as I genuinely love this release.

Spread over seven tracks Scorpio Scorpio is a mean motherfucker from Australia, very much in the Mark “Chopper” Read mold with no mould, a one man assault system with a twisted sense of humour and a vocabulary turns the air blue. 

The life of a one band as described/explained by Leo Sayer many years ago is a tough and lonely road of existence.  It is made even lonelier when you are selling drugs and performing bank jobs.  To combine drum n bass with guitars in this manner truly is something of a criminal act, like an Australian Devo on crystal meth, packing to settle nerves.

Scorpio Scorpio is the king of the infectious blast of aggression, slamming/smashing electro music fires through in a lo-fi industrial style as jagged guitars like parchments of AC/DC feedback with hooks aplenty. 

The real strength of the release is in the lyrical content that is spat out like bullets – this is pure poetry in its execution.  Opening track “Utility (You And Me)” verges on pure pop perfection, following the announcement “fuckin’ turn it up”, Scorpio Scorpio calls out the listener “have a go” before using the basic genius principle of having a chorus including “na na na na na.”  It just works!

With song titles as “Ayatollah Rock’N’Roller” and “Cobra (Knobya)” it would take a very stone faced person not to find humour in this record, the type of person that may have experienced a fatality at the hands of Mr Scorpio Scorpio himself.  There are no innocent bystanders connected with this music, especially when “Cobra (Knobya)” is concerned. 

The one sad flaw of this record are the high fidelity qualities, they are sadly lower than such a collection deserves.  For some this could prove a spoiling point but for others this may even make the music.

Thesaurus moment: schismatic. 

Scorpio Scorpio

After 17 studio albums and having a foreign organism having fed off her food then forcibly left her poor body in a process known as ‘child-birth’, the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Ani Difranco decided not to put her feet up. Instead she decided to make a live DVD of her band playing in a converted church in downtown Manhattan. It happens to be one she restored into the delightful venue Babeville, named after her record label, Righteous Babe.

Ani plays a sophisticated strain of acoustic pop; intelligent, tasteful and shrewdly put together. Her music resembles a toned-down and less bloody-minded Alanis Morissette, but not without a terrific bite to the lyrics. They concern a few main topics: politics, activism, identity; a good number of songs sketch out the ‘get-out-of-my-house-and-my-life’ scenario, or the pursuing of a successful relationship and the inevitable pain of it never succeeding. And how bloody awful men are. Hmm. Ani’s a long-suffering activist and outspoken critic of, well, lots of things, evident in this gem of a justification:

Every time I say something they find hard to hear / They chalk it up to my anger / And never to their own fear

As she begins her set, Ani tells the crowd that “I hope you feel photogenic” as 6 cameras dart around the hall, her drummer, percussionist and bassist retaining poise as they poke around their unmentionables. The percussionist, Mike Dillon, is Difranco’s discreet but remarkable bandmember, who warps his vibes through a delay pedal, squashing the signal about the tall church walls, with some delicate tabla tapping to compliment the mix.

While trying to avoid, avoid, avoid the irresistible cliché, (her lyrics are so clever that it will out anyhow): every song is a story, an argument. Let’s not forget the magnificent lyrics to her latest song ‘Present/Infant’ – (very touching considering the arrival of her child): “I would defend to the ends of the earth / Her perfect right to be”. The sight of a parent moulding their young to an ‘ideal child’ is always worrying – Ani’s artistic and maternal dignity is sealed in a sentence. I think I love her.

Pascal Ansell

http://www.righteousbabe.com/