Offensively fowl-mouthed, dark and disturbing, Little Miss X’s sophomore
release “assaults the barriers between spoken word/poetry and song,” say the band
themselves. Twins Jonny and Marty Hammer drop Clock Puncher only nine months
after their first release, and were invited to participate in a couple of events in the
Melbourne Writer’s Festival for their efforts.
Jonny is the poet while Marty is responsible for mixing a chaotic combination of
rock and electronica to match the themes and moods of the poems. The 13-track
album schizophrenically switches from nightmare-ish, orchestral strings with a
harsh, gravelly voice reverberating throughout title track Clock Puncher, to hard rock
thrashing, yelling and swearing in Blocked to trance-like electronica on Heart Of
Stone.
Track four, Black Blues, is more familiar with its sharp return to rockier grunge. It’s
less leftfield and willingly ‘artistic’ than the previous tracks, but is still disquieting –
the band describe it as “a murderer’s lament or commitment”. Panties is repulsively
sexually explicit, The Betrayal is a spoken word narrative and one of the few tracks
that isn’t spotted with profanities and Girl is a spooky, voyeuristic examination of an
interaction with an attractive girl.
If the voice didn’t sound so much like Jack Nicholson, and I hadn’t recently watched
The Shining, I might have been able to enjoy the descriptive realism of the language
in the tracks. Instead, my imagination conjured scenes of hallways flooding with blood.
