Skinny Girl Diet: Heavyflow
Released September 23rd, 2016
08/10
Much anticipated debut album from London trio Skinny Girl Diet
Singer, songwriter and guitarist Delilah Holliday, drummer Ursula Holliday, and bassist Amelia Cutler formed Skinny Girl Diet back in 2010 in London. Since then they have built up a strong following with their blistering live sets and have released a handful of singles and EPs. Now the band are releasing their debut album: Heavyflow.
The opening track– Comedown – opens with a scrawling, squawking guitar that resolves into a melody that is drifting, dreamlike, almost relaxing before track two, Yeti, which is grungy, dirty, loud and discordant, kicks in. The drum beat almost jazz-like. The bass deep and reverberating. The guitar a shrieking nail down the blackboard. The vocals full of bite and anger. This sets the tone for the sound of the album which is a mix of melody, grunge, punk and a downright aural assault.
There is clearly a grunge/Hole influence going on. Okay is a song that has an almost Californian vibe but with a dark edge that could only be from the London streets Skinny Girl Diet come from. Lazy Eye is scuzzy blues. Bored (the universal cry of all young bands) is a hard core slash of a song; there is melody here but it is messed up, drowned out with white noise. Fix Me is dream-grunge and Forget has a garage/psych feel to it. Wasted Smile is a slow sultry smoke shrouded silhouette, before the screaming starts.
Skinny Girl Diet have punk attitude in spittoons. For all that punk did to give women a voice in rock (and, in my opinion, the effect is overrated) the music industry is still riven with dreadful misogyny and sexism. As is society. Hardy a day passes without some news report on social network bullying of the most insidious kind visited on a female who dared to stand up for herself. Music, as well as society, needs bands like Skinny Girl Diet to take a feminist stand. Women’s voices need to be heard. In this instance the voice is screaming and shouting out of the discordant noise of modern life. A modern life that seeks to silence such voices.
Rock can still be an outlet for anger and rebellion. But if rock is to have a much needed renaissance, it needs to come from somewhere other than the typical white male stereotype.
Welcome Skinny Girl Diet.
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Skinny Girl Diet are on Facebook and Twitter.
All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Twitter.
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