GIRLS AGAINST BOYS
House of GVSB
Touch and Go
9 Stars

I wish this review was on a CD-ROM, so you could click and hear "Super-Fire" open the festivities here for 40-or-so seconds. A fast metal-chime guitarriff (like a snippet of Big Black or Killing Joke) repeats four times, then heavy drums surge in along with two thick bass-lines, the guitar switches to a sticky wah-wah drip, and Scott McCloud adds his flat speak/sing (like Mark E. Smith of the Fall, but under tight lyrical control), mouthing "nothing satisfies" with enough pump and angle that the sentiment isn't hackneyed-just another needle under your skin.

The 40 minutes that follow these 40 seconds feature multiple surges just as utterly convincing. It's the biggest, most contemporary sounding, and physically enticing hard rock anyone is offering just now-psychedelia, funk, lounge, and industrial fused with clipped precision and unbounded vigor into a skeleton of postpunk-band innovations that Girls Against Boys have studied with the passion of jazz musicians.

Although GvsB were the subjects of a major-label bidding war-Geffen won, but the band chose to honor an oral, three-LP agreement with Touch and Go and release one final indie album-the band really isn't that similar to the scrunge minnows imitating Seattle. "I like to feel the microphone in my teeth," McCloud once said. He doesn't bellow and mope like an Eddie Vedder or Trent Reznor (though "Vera Cruz" kicks a NIN synth-beat to flex a different muscle). And the thick-but-kicking center, with sweet edges scratched against it (like nails on a blackboard in reverse), that GvsB uses to hook you in relies neither on harmonic Beatles/ Nirvana choruses nor Zep/Sabbath/ Soundgarden power-chords.

They've got a different pedigree: blue-blood indie rock. In the late 1980s, McCloud, bassist Johnny Temple, and drummer Alexis Fleisig were the backing musicians in the Dischord combo Soulside, a band produced by Eli Janney, now GvsB's second bassist and keyboardist. (He's also the band's backing vocalist, his falsetto a major melodic element.) Girls Against Boys began in 1988 as a studio project involving McCloud, Janney, and Fugazi's Brendan Canty, releasing an EP and album in that form before becoming a full band, signing to Chicago's Touch and Go (bastion of artcore guitars and post- Big Black "pigfuck" impurism) and moving to Sonic Youth's town, NYC.

Fugazi, Big Black, even Sonic Youth. These are some of the postpunk tributaries pop-alternative has largely passed by; Girls Against Boys' achievement is to show how the legacy of bands like these (as well as Joy Division, Public Image Limited, the Stooges, early Pere Ubu, and especially the Fall) wasn't insular avant-gardism but a revolution in how hard rock could sound, must sound, if it's to go forward. On previous albums, GvsB were faceless compared to their elders, too turgid or fracturedly experimental for anyone but hipsters to care. Maybe they were schooling, gathering chops, because House of GVSB is propulsive and undeniable, a goddamn sex machine.