Red Aunts

Ghetto Blaster (Epitaph)
by Scott Hefflon

The Red Aunts are not punk in the conventional sense, but they’re probably punker than most punk bands. They’ve been heading in this direction for some time, but while some songs on Ghetto Blaster have elements of either garage, rockabilly, or DK-style jerkiness, they aren’t punk the way most people’d think of it. Seeing as these 12 songs were recorded in a day and a half (I’ve never understood why bands brag about how quickly they can record something they want fans to buy and cherish forever), I’m unsure if Ghetto Blaster is littered with impromptu weirdness, abrasive guitar screeches, toneless banshee wails (often distorting the microphone), spacy sounds, mock twangs, and complete disregard for anything resembling “cohesion” by meticulous design, or “Hell, we jammed, it happened, Epitaph put it out.” Either this is punk-as-shit avant noise rock bound to rejuvenate the chaotic creativity that’s been bled from rock music, or it’s a whipped-off gem, a quick snapshot of a truly inspired bunch of musicians too whacked and diverse for their own good. It’s hard to tell if the Red Aunts are “good,”per se, or merely strike a barely-tuned chord of lunacy that really needed striking. In a perfect world, long-term fans and experimentalists would totally trip out on all the colliding ideas on this album, but I think the general public enjoys sucking their own asses and will write off this slab of madness as “weird.” Dumbfucks.