Pettybone – From Desperate Times Comes Radical Minds

The all-female punk combo is hardly an untried concept but what Pettybone bring to the table is a sense of righteous conviction that the likes of The Donnas could never have hoped to muster, and there is more of the frenziedly unpredictable energy of Converge and The Blood Brothers to their sound than ear-friendly hooks; the melody is still there, it’s just a little more jagged than you might expect.

Their socially-aware yet thankfully bereft of preachiness lyrics are direct but eloquent, rammed home by crudely effective batteries of snare and riffs that are prone to switching pace and tone with perverse abandon. Slow and measured moments of fingerpicked tension, hell for leather assaults of three-chord frenzy and even a sinister take on the blues accompanied by the wise words of Howlin’ Wolf; they all play their part in making up a potent cocktail of punk creativity that says something to everyone, regardless of what's between their legs.