Veruca Salt

There are reasons Veruca Salt are making noise in the indie-rock world: The Chicago
foursome has written a clever lyric or two; Louise Post and Nina Gordon sing with girlish
aplomb; and guitarists Post and Gordon, bassist Steven J. Lack and drummer Jim Shapiro
have come up with some melodies that lodge themselves in your brain and resonate. On
American Thighs, Veruca Salt's debut album, there are moments when the band (... More >

Who cares whether it's "real" or not? However much Nina Gordon, Louise Post, and their bepenised rhythm section sound like the Breeders, you could tell the two apart in a blindfold test (probably). But the confluences overpower the divergences anyway, and good. Commercial calculation is as irrelevant here as they're-just-a-band gender-has-nothing-to-do-with-it crapola. Whatever their motives and existential reality, they're less coy, less goofy, clearer melodically, and surer of their rhythmic turf at least in part because the Breeders got over, thus diminishing (but not eliminating) their felt need for diversionary tactics in a continuing project of aesthetic reconceptualization--creating a pop-rock style that steers between male-identified canons of manipulative pseudocertainty and female-identified canons of pseudoconfessional sensitivity. At present, what they say with that style means less than how coherently and attractively they configure it. If and when they become (even) better artists, it won't. (Grade: A-)