Babysitters On Acid

Album Review

The Lunachicks' shtick was well in place by the time Babysitters on Acid appeared, a debut which didn't have much to say, but said it with enough base humor and zealous punk antics to keep the spirit of comic anti-revolution alive. Unsurprisingly, like many punk revivalists in the 1990s, the Lunachicks were busy with pop culture references (The Brady Bunch, James Bond) and offensive lyrics ("Lord, I hope they never come back!/ok kid, step on the oven rack/you wanna know how the baby is?/don't worry, she's almost done"), all the while relying too deeply on heavy metal riffs and sloppy drumming, as if the idea of methodically recreating the dubious skill of the punk movement didn't carry with it its own irony. But no other group had a singer like Theo Kogan, who was Ari Up, the Dwarves, and Courtney Love all at once. Famous for dressing up in blood-splattered wedding dresses and scowling through songs like her life revolved around Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Kogan would take the band from an all-girl Queens of the Stone Age to a band that was aggressive and satirical, but in a non-threatening way. With her help, Babysitters on Acid became a debut that outshined its limitations, not least of which its premature release, and she gave you the idea that the Lunachicks' best material was right around the corner.