We People Space With Phantoms

Chicago's Scissor Girls play a defiantly fractured brand of rock that takes punk aesthetics and slants them with the scratchy post-punk of bands like Wire and the Fall, then takes this in such an extreme, non-pop direction that the results are occasionally reminiscent of Japanese bands like Melt-Banana and the Boredoms. Something about the band's complex sense of guitar work, dynamics and overall organization, however, lends this extremely deconstructive sound a fairly accessible appeal; rather than a no-wave-style attack on music's conventions, the Scissor Girls manage to bring the original excitement of punk back into a musical context where pop-punk has become a fairly banal mainstream sound. We People Space with Phantoms follows this agenda fairly strictly; the 7" and EP tracks collected on Here Is the "Is-Not" have an even more accessible appeal to them.