Great inheritors of the Rough Trade grrrl-punk spirit of the late '70s.
author: Kevin John, "boston Phoenix"
This San Francisco quartet tack on some dub ("Smoke Ring Day") at the end of Cancel the Wedding, their very Slits-like debut disc. And there are echoes of the Raincoats in the sound of Diane Wallis's sawed violin. As with the she mobs of old, that tone in the voices of the songs' subjects—a friend from the Midwest (who gulps "Prozac"), "Emily" (who never ventures into town), "Mrs. Idey" (who drives off too far outside it)—leaves you wondering whether they're being praised as rebels or ridiculed as hopeless cases. Sometimes their perspective yields surreal refrains, like the understated observation "There has been a big mistake" in the song where a puppy morphs into a man. And sometimes She Mob sound downright revolutionary, as in the remarkable "Teacher," which reveals that students aren't the only ones who long for the day school's out forever.
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'Cancel the Wedding' - #2 on "Real Life Rock Top 10"
author: Greil Marcus, Salon.com
As with such modest, cutting 1980s U.K. punk combos as Delta 5, women singing like people having real conversations. Increasingly funny, vehement, distracted conversations. For example, 'Why did I become a teacher? Why did I become a teacher?' For all the right reasons, but...
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The under-a-minute "Luge" sounds like Pere Ubu going bicoastal if not binary.
author: Richard Riegel, "village Voice"
Whoever's singing—Hutchinson in her expressive gush, Wallis as a kind of litterbox-trained Nico, or drummer Lisa McElroy—the homemade lyrics are clever and funny slices of everyday lives carried on beneath the radar of the daily orgies atop the stock market, in humbly passionate rooms where people take Prozac and are sometimes reincarnated as puppies. Let's just call She Mob "passive-resistance grrrls.
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