It sounds like the sort of high concept joke that's funny once -- maybe.
Lesbians on Ecstasy, as their name suggests, take feminist rock classics from the past and retool them for the modern-day dance floor. But their album doesn't just take the Olivia Records catalog in toto and put a house beat behind it;
Lesbians on Ecstasy is more clever and subversive than that. Rather than actually covering these songs, the quartet takes elements from them and twists them in sly, suggestive new directions:
k.d. lang's torchy classic "Constant Craving" turns into the ironic
Laibach-style industrial stomp of "Kundstant Kroving," for example, and the
Parachute Club's cheerleading "Rise Up" becomes the suggestively throbbing "Parachute Clubbing." The best of the lot is the creepy-sexy S/M take on
Rough Trade's sexual politics primer "High School Confidential." Provocative on a level somewhere between, say,
Le Tigre and
Peaches,
Lesbians on Ecstasy have created a noisy, gleefully sloppy brand of dance-punk with brains and humor. ~ Stewart Mason