After The Distillers and Spinnerette Brody Dalle arrived in 2014 with her first solo album Diploid Love. Sounding like a 21st century Joan Jett on speed, adventuring into Programmed Pop Punk, the album opens with Rat Race and you get the feeling that this new slicker evolution is attempting simple, straightforward, easy access, catchy guitar driven studio thrash – that’s until you hear the trumpets.

The next track, Underworld seems like the same idea except the trumpets are there again, alerting you to the vehicle careering down on you like a missile. But then you remember that The Saints had brass and that before Chicago became syrup that brass meant punch. Still the mariachi funeral feel at the end of the song is a surprise. So she’s trying to break out of the pigeon hole and find new ground, she has to.

Don’t Mess With Me might have been a hit in another era, catchy, raspy voice, relentless rhythm, something you might hear on the radio, if only the people that like this kind of music listened to the radio.

By the time we get to Dressed In Dreams, you wonder whatever happened to Curve. You wonder if the programming can sell this kind of singer, it worked with Curve, but there’s something more street organic about Brody that tells me she doesn’t need the machines, she needs Budgie or Pete De Freitas.

Carry On is an odd mix of piano that sounds like a real bar piano and programming that would resurrect Human League fans from the dead but with Dalle’s troubled lyrical schtick I’m not sure you can discuss your emotional struggles with a machine.

Meet the Foetus /Oh the Joy is a collaboration with Shirley Manson from Garbage and suddenly you understand where’s she going with all this as she attempts a sophisticated production with the ground rules of Punk –  and it almost works. But whereas Manson and friends have taken the designer pills, fly the hover cars and eat food from silver sachets allocated in sensible rations from a white robot, Dalle still sounds like she arrived at the studio on a Triumph Bonneville or at least a ’58 Chevy, a bag of fries, a milk shake and a pistol on the passenger seat.

I Don’t Need Your Love is on paper the weakest track and for me the strongest and exactly where she should be. The arrival of her kids in the middle of the song screaming in joyous bath time is perfected domestic reality manifested in experiment. Here she mixes Sharon Von Etten with P.J. Harvey on a carnival carousel into beautiful madness.

She does it again with Blood In Gutters, my other favourite track on the album. This is the Brody Dalle I love, Raspy, a little scary, sounding like a band, escaping the confines of Punk, darker, dirtier, richer, weirder and better.

The album finishes with Parties For Prostitutes back in programming land with a mellotron on a merry-go-round. Chainsaw guitars and strange lurching rhythms that has me in despair thinking that the best three tracks are the last three songs on the album.

And so the transformation is complete – almost. A new look, blonde, making records under her own name and searching for her place after the visceral fist of The Distillers. She might be the coolest Mum on the block, in Palm Springs she must be the coolest Mum in town and I just love hearing about how she went from The Distillers to Josh and three kids, fantastic. But she has to make music, she has to find her place, her voice has to be heard. She’s the pin up girl for passionate Punk musical evolution into darklands where the dead flowers are beautiful and the truth hangs from the branches, told in the tattoos, and tales of surviving the past, growing, inspired – let’s not wait five years for another album.

Blood In Gutters

Out of the Gods unto the earth
Under the sky back into the dirt
You have a secret deep down inside… And i know
A horror to tell
A nightmare to hide

Find your weakness and kill it
Find your weakness, go on, kill it
So long, good riddance

There’s blood in the gutters, it’s flooding the path
Killing us slowly chemical wrath
Suffer the madness cling to the birth
O a new era to hell with our worth
Find your weakness and kill it
Find your weakness, go on, kill it
So long, good riddance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brody_Dalle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Distillers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinnerette