April 20, 1999

Get Skintight

A funny thing, 'girl power' - never more so than when men are all for it....

7 / 10 A funny thing, 'girl power' - never more so than when men are all for it. Take The Donnas. Once, they were four teenage girls who wanted to rock so bad they let some guy write all their songs and svengali them into a Runaways for the tongue-in-cheek '90s. They were tuff chicks who rocked, but in a way conducive to the wet dreams of aging men. They played ramalama proto-punk, wore tight '50s tees with their stage names on them, and gained some acclaim with their second album, 'American Teenage Rock'N'Roll Machine' whose inner sleeve unfolded into a Donnas photo-calendar. Sleater-Kinney, they were not.

/img/Donnas599.jpg A couple of years in, when enough observers had pointed out the absurdity of four women needing some bloke to artistically supervise three chords, The Donnas dumped their manager. Bar an ace cover of Mvtley Cr|e's 'Too Fast For Love', 'Get Skintight' is all The Donnas' own work: 38 minutes of slightly better produced, three-chord proto-punk that will find favour with anyone who likes "stereo" to rhyme with "go, go, go!".

Happily, the dumb-ass glee of The Ramones is never far away, particularly on unrequited love chugs like 'You Don't Wanna Call' "You think I don't know how to eat dim sum", Donna A deadpans). The superlative 'I Didn't Like You Anyway' ("I knew you were lame/From your wallet chain") is pure AC/DC, though, which may point to uncharted new musical frontiers for The Donnas to explore on their next album.