Watching her, and listening to her, it’s easy to imagine that Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland is The Exorcist’s Regan MacNeil all grown up. But still possessed. There’s the shrieking, the eerie laughter, the speaking in tongues. And the horrible noises she produces with her electric guitar. And those eyes! They’re too big and too empty. And the way her pupils seem to literally click from here to there in their sockets—scary. They’re horror movie doll’s eyes. You can’t take your eyes off her, because you’re afraid.
Hardly what you’d expect from a high school cheerleader and huge Rush fan (saw ‘em four times!) whose first gig was with her uncle in a band called the Neurotics, but then Manson right-hand-man Tex Watson was the captain of his high school football team and everybody’s favorite berserker Gibby Haynes was “Accounting Student of the Year” at Trinity University. It’s the normal ones you have to keep your eye on.
Bjelland formed several short-lived bands (including Pagan Babies with frenemy Courtney Love) before moving from Portland to Minneapolis in 1986, where she met Lori Barbero and told her that never having played drums before made her the ideal drummer—she had nothing to unlearn. Just add bass player, and presto, Babes in Toyland was born.
And thanks to Bjelland’s fractured, jagged punk songs, unhinged baby doll on fire vocals and slasher flick guitar, Babes in Toyland went on to produce three celebrated full-length LPs, play the festival circuits and somehow find themselves on a major label before breaking up in late 2001. The torch, it seemed, had been passed to Hole and Love, whose famously abrasive vocals sound downright prim when compared to Bjelland’s.
When it comes to the best of Babes in Toyland’s LPs the smart money is on their sophomore disc and major label debut, 1992’s Fontanelle, which was co-produced by Bjelland and Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo. It was certainly their best seller, and the critics were effusive in their praise. Me, I prefer their debut, 1990’s Spanking Machine. It often gets the “grunge” label slapped on it, perhaps because it was recorded in Seattle and produced by grunge producer of choice, Jack Endino. It’s not a grunge record by anyone’s stretch of the imagination, although that hasn’t stopped it from ending up at the number 27 spot on Rolling Stone’s 2017 list of the “50 Greatest Grunge Albums.” I suspect that had Endino produced Paula Abdul at around the same time, that album would be on the list too.
Spanking Machine comes closer to good old Minneapolis noise rock—raw, dissonant punk with zero concessions to prettiness or “femininity” but with definite symptoms of dementia praecox. Manic impressive opener “Swamp Pussy” may be my favorite Babes in Toyland track ever (with the speaking-in-tongues classic “Angel Hair” a close second). It’s opening is the only normal thing on the album—you get a couple of seconds of trad intro and then in comes Bjelland playing this fractured and dissonant guitar with some chukka-chukka in it while issuing guttural screams and repeated cries of “Cease to exist, cease to exist!”, which just goes to show she’s familiar with the work of the auteur Charles Manson.
On the pound-your-face-in propulsive “He’s My Thing,” Bjelland veers between screaming, roaring, and issuing threats—she only lowers her voice in order to put the shockers on you when she raises it to a blood-curdling scream. It’s like her vocal cords are razor blades, and the words “force of nature” come to mind, a phrase that can be applied as well to the brief but sanguine guitar solo she tosses off.
“Vomit Heart” isn’t as full-bore propulsive, but the rhythm section mimics a fatal heart attack while Bjelland projectile vomits psycho-sexual nausea: “I wear the same face as you/and you share my sick point of view/But I do hate you/Vomit my heart/Pull my head apart/Vomit my heart/Pull my legs apart” while perpetuating some seriously atonal fret abuse on the guitar. And she really lets loose on the ax on “Never,” opening with some truly fucked-up shred before getting all rhythmic on the beast. Kinda reminds me of “Sex Beat” sans the sex, and the beat—what you get is straight-razor on guitar strings mayhem and some truly maniacal laughter.
“Boto (W)rap” opens as a herky-jerky rhythmic instrumental with Burundi beat drumming and some weird Minneapolis blizzard surf guitar, then Bjelland comes in speed singing before things revert to form. Nifty. “Dogg,” Barbero’s sole contribution, is a drone that drags itself across the vinyl. It’s a slow bummer compared to Bjelland’s songs, and Bjelland’s vocals are missed. “Pain in My Heart” is a grinding and surprisingly melodic semi-dirge on which Bjelland drags out the kinda eerie lyrics (“Why?/Why did you leave me/When I was still inside of you”) only to cut loose with a fiercely angry, “Fry/Fucking fry/Fucking fry/Fucking fry/Fucking fry/Fucking/My blue boyfriend!”
“Lashes” is all raw power freakout with Bjelland singing less from the gut than from the belly of the beast, and the stop and starts that pepper the song are just pauses for her to plot some new vocal outrage. She even plays nice here and there, by which I mean she sings like a normal person, before exploding into the kinds of outbursts that got women labeled witches in olden times. “You’re Right” is a jazzy dissonant guitar exercise that morphs into a full-frontal assault until the bass comes in and Bjelland sings while playing some helter skelter guitar. On this one the Minutemen meet a woman purging her demons.
But if it’s a real purge you’re looking for I recommend “Dust Cake Boy,” which has this weird gallop to it over which Bjelland screams, pauses two seconds, spits out some lyrics, and then shrieks the same word over and over again in a ferocious staccato burst: I don’t know what the following lines mean:
“She screams out your name ’cause she sweats to be
Me, me, me, me, me, me
Has a crystalline cunt made of mint julep
Tea, tea, tea, tea, tea, tea.”
But this is clear enough:
“Woah, dust cake boy he fucks
Woah, he fucks real
God, he fucks real mean
He fucks mean, he fucks mean.”
Is that a good thing? I’ll be damned if I know. Bjelland is wonderfully inscrutable on the subject.
On powerhouse metal closer “Fork Down Throat” Bjelland sounds almost restrained, by which I mean she only seems to be going into epileptic convulsions a couple of times. Mostly she’s just pouring gasoline on herself and striking a match, or throwing herself into a guitar solo that is jagged and crunge-encrusted you’ll want to get a tetanus shot.
Bjelland is a medium, the conduit between this world and some other, and unlike some artists I can think of, her channeling of her demons doesn’t seem like a calculated act. She did everything with that supernatural voice of hers but handle snakes, and the sense you get listening to her is that she was born with her nerves on the wrong side of her skin.
Babes in Toyland inspired many a riot grrrl, but they had no time for pamphlets and manifestos and all of the rest of it. Bjelland’s self-exorcisms were all the riot they needed.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
