Pussy Galore – Sounds: Mean Fiddler [23 November 1988] (PRESS, UK)

The set lasted 30 seconds.

“Will ya welcome the biggest piece-a-shit-band from Nu York – Pussy Galore,” bawled the MC, and after half a minute of Munster riff racket, they’d gone. Luckily, the encore was a bit longer.

With an extra guitar, Pussy Galore are now 24 rusty cheesewire strings slicing up the kind of scrawny multi-story garage riffs that would have scared even Bryon Gregory’s Cramps.

The new LP, ‘Sugarshit Sharp’, sprinkles a sharper, clearer sound, peeling off the integral filth of Albini’s ’87 trash classic LP, ‘Right Now’. But all of that speaker-scarring dirt has been saved up for the live show.

Chief garage mechanic, Jon Spencer, is still wearing the flesh-coloured lame shirt featured on the album cover that should long-since have been banished to the laundrette. He and sulky Juicy Cafritz scream and swear like animated graffiti and, with only Bob Bert’s petrol tank rattling to offset the guitars, they set about carving off the bass and drum flab that lardass US rawk ‘n’ roll has defied.

After 30 minutes, having annihilated Devo’s ‘Penetration’ and most of ‘Sugarshit”s second side they leave for good.

Pussy Galore are the gatecrashers at Sonic Youth’s garage party. And if Bob Bert’s old band are skipping blithely into Melvyn Bragg’s slobbering embrace as Great Art, Pussy Galore will have something to say about it.

And it’ll involve a lot of swearing.
Paul Splatch ”