Words by Lou Wright
What’s in a comeback album? I see two basic reasons for a band to rocket back from the crypt of pop culture. First there’s the desire to keep doing what you were doing for a new group of people – the feeling that you stopped short and want to return to your roots, bring the old charge to the old fans and see what a new crop of musicheads think. Second would be a desire for something musically new. There might be a need to prove that a pigeonhole you and your band crawled into back in the day ain’t the be-all and end-all, or maybe you have nothing to prove and just want to use your existing connections to get something new, different, and possibly horrid out into the world.
As a fan looking at a comeback record, those creative reasons can be inverted into reasons to buy – either you want the good old jams or you want to see what the artists have been up to recently. Well, look here. You’re not gonna get either of those. What you’re gonna get is The Slits’ comeback Trapped Animal (Narnack, 2009).
You’re not gonna get the good old shit because lead vox Ari Up and bass banger Tessa Pollitt have grown up quite a bit and brought on a new crew. You’re also not gonna get the good old stuff because you probably don’t know what it is. The Slits tend to fall through the cracks in punk rock history, with the exception that everybody remembers their cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” As the girl power reggae-ragga counterpart to The Clash and The Sex Pistols, The Slits are often overshadowed historically by their contemporaries. This is unfair to them and to the public in general. They kicked ass. They still do.
That being said, you’re not gonna get the new shit either, because the band has stayed true as hell to its roots. Here, in all its glory, are the bouncing, infectious rhythms of Cut, the snarky, bitchy lyrics intoned in something between a cat’s snarl and a Desmond Dekker croon. Here is the slitheringly sexual “Lazy Slam”, the caustic proto-punk timebomb of “Reject”, and the freaked out love-gone-wrong dub thump of “Partner From Hell.”
The songs speak for themselves, echoing the sound of a vibrant musical era with the added punch of teched-up production and the kind of attitude that only comes with age. Here is a window into a time when punk and reggae were first running headlong into each other. The powerful sonic assault of early London dub attracted punks who wanted nothing more than a technology that would make them louder and more abrasive. They were embraced by a culture already more marginalized than their own. Shit clicked. Early Slits music is a testament to the band’s ability to blend the attitude of one style with the sound of another, and they haven’t stopped to this day.
What’s the conclusion? We’ve proved, thus far, that none of the traditional reasons to make a new Slits record pushed the band to make Trapped Animal, and I’ve assured you that the traditional reasons for buying comeback albums don’t apply here. So what’s the draw? Simple.
The record fucking rocks.
