Punk-Rock Girl

BRODY ARMSTRONG AND THE DISTILLERS SERVE UP SOME HARD STUFF

FANFAIR

ANYONE: over 25 who doesn't have excess energy might want to get a good night's sleep before cranking up the Distillers, an extremely noisy foursome fashioned from without by a darkly decorous punkrock aesthetic, and from within by a surplus of antipathy toward, well, everything and nothing in particular. Front woman Brody Armstrong, an Australian-born veteran of the West Coast punk circuit (her first band's name, a clue to her customary disposition, was Sourpuss), comes with star credentials: erstwhile drug user, estranged wife of Rancid's Tim Armstrong and now consort to Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, and admirer of both the X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" and the collected works of Samuel Beckett. Times are right, or so it seems, for some amped-up rock, and the band's third release—its first on a major label—Coral Fang, delivers exactly that, along with a liberal helping of anti-Establishment rage. "People," Armstrong ventures cheerily, "are sick of being brainwashed." While the Distillers are punk in essence, they don't subscribe to the belief, commonly held by spiky-haired malcontents, that appealing to the mainstream is equivalent to selling out. "For a genre that said it didn't have any rules, it's got more than any other," Armstrong says. "And I don't like rules." So if MTV's Total Request Live calls, Brody and her boys will be there. "It would be strange," concedes drummer Andy Granelli, "but the way things are going, anything's possible."

EDWARD HELMORE

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE