Being a girl hurts sometimes. If you aren’t one and therefore didn’t know or understand the extent of how much, have a listen to this album and you’ll soon empathise. If you do happen to wake up female every day and you’re having a tough time of it, pour yourself a tall glass of this and neck it. Stat.
Every generation gets its soundtrack for being fucked-over, heartbroken, or misunderstood. While being a little jealous that I’m now just this side of too old to get emotionally overwrought in my room with the music up loud writing in my diary because no one understands me, I’m very happy for today’s adolescents to have a band like Valentiine to serve that very purpose.
The three young Melbourne ladies, (Erica, Rachelle and Vanessa) have taken one for the team here and smashed it out of the park on their scorching debut album. It’s proper, raw, gruelling femme-rock. They pick up what nineties torch-bearers like L7, Hole and Magic Dirt’s Adalita so ferociously put down, and run away with it – while pulling its hair and smudging its eyeliner, of course.
The genre’s requisite angst is most evident on the opening track Hates Me and later on Better For Me, while the band’s real song writing strength – blatant emotional nakedness and the ability to lay it out bare in a way that connects – rules the album on Never Forget You, the painfully beautiful, rip-your-heart-out allure of Birthday and the heaving closer, Today’s Tomorrow.
While the album serves as an effortlessly smooth aural experience with all nine of the songs existing in seamless cohesion with each other, it is a credit to the charisma of the individual songs that while listening, there is an almost distracting desire to hear them live instead, as if that would be the unlocking of their true nature and potential.
Like the legendary purveyors of the sound in its heyday, Valentiine have managed to craft a satisfyingly downbeat girl-grunge album that will retain relevance over time and the changing conditions in the lives of listeners.
Best Track: Birthday
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: VERUCA SALT, BEACHES
In A Word: Feline
