Screaming Females Make Their Point

Screaming Females seems to be an appropriately named band simply because they sound like another bunch of screaming females who used to go by the moniker of L7. Listening to Screaming Females, who incidentally only have a female vocalist, on Castle Talk, is like listening to a post grunge fuzzathon coming straight out of a stack of Marshall amps into your living room. Castle Talk is a loud, brash, post grunge experience that's surrounded it's self with all kinds of distorted, dirty and fuzzed out influences that act as rocket fuel powering this record to a post flannel world of grungified destruction.

Screaming Females churn out power chord after power chord while strained scratchy vocals shatter your hearing and solid jack hammer like beats pound their way into your skull. And yet, despite all this apocalyptic post-grunge riffage the band manage to find bits and bobs of songs that produce some degree of melody. It's almost as if they found the remnants of Mudhoney's discography scattered amongst the remains of New Jersey and threw them into their chemically fueled equation. Castle Talk is one heck of a ride that would have been absolutely massive in 1992, but now sounds as if this is a record that time forgot. That being said, the Screaming Females have managed to produce a pretty decent record here that's filled with punk, grunge, and indie all living together in harmony dead center in a mosh pit of chaos.

Songs like, "Boss," are choppy, motion sickness inducing tunes that sway from quiet to loud with the warbley vocals of Marissa Paternoster hovering above it all. It's impressively powerful stuff that almost sounds like too much music for just three people to create, yet this trio crank up the gigawatts and churn out the tsunami of sound that they call Castle Talk. I throughly enjoyed this record despite fearing it from the beginning. Rough, edgy, and with the power of a pack of hungry lions Screaming Females are one heck of a group and Castle Talk is a spiky sound treat that anyone who pretended they were dead will love.