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Clorox Girls
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Let it go...no really. Does it matter that the Clorox Girls are boys? No. What matters is the music they make and the impression they leave after the final sweaty mongoloid fan leaves the club. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley nailed it 'with their quip that the Clorox Girls �are harder to ignore than a trouser full of antlers.� Too right...
What you have in the Clorox Girls is a band that plays late 70s style punk, from a time when punk was influenced by the likes of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens, Little Richard, Elvis, and Howlin Wolf. Couple this with early '80s Los Angeles, you know, the Gears, Controllers, Germs, Red Cross, (Chavo) Black Flag, Dickies, (along with healthy serving of early Who, some unhealthy French pop obsessions) and you have an idea of where these three Girls are coming from. The band's origins can be traced to 2003 Oakland, CA. As Justin puts it �We were living in this dingy warehouse full of crust punks and wanted to start a band that was real poppy, kind of like the first Red Cross EP, the polar opposite of the hopeless dark crust that they were always playing.� They recruited Justin�s girlfriend on bass and began to play frequently around the Bay area before employing a �blitzkrieg tour strategy� that took them throughout the West Coast. This brought them to the attention of Portland�s Jonny Cat Records who released their 4-song 7� debut to great acclaim. Blitzkrieg still in their eyes, the band embarked on its first US/Canadian tour in the fall of 2003. It was on this tour that SmartGuy Records crossed paths with the band at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. After a few trips to various local taquerias, a partnership was formed. Next stop, Conrad Uno�s Egg Studios in Seattle with Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks) twiddling about with the knobs for two days to come up with the �killer� 12-song debut that was released in early 2004. New record, same result. Rave reviews abound. The initial pressing of 400 LPs sold out in two weeks so what was left to do�? Press up 350 more and tour the states in July and August. The high note of this trip was a live WFMU radio session at which they shared the air with Belgian punk legends The Kids. Not bad for three girls from Portland! The lads closed out the year with some West Coast dates and a bit of recording. 2005 and 2006 brought the band throughout Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. In the year of 2006 almost 300 shows were played. The end of their South American tour brought the boys some lineup changes, and they headed into the studio straightaway, as BYO Records out of Los Angeles (established in 1979, one of the few original surviving US punk labels along with Dischord, Touch & Go, and Alternative Tentacles� amongst their many classic releases are Youth Brigade, The Briefs, 7 Seconds, and Aggression) offered recording money for a third LP. The boys agreed to a two-album deal with BYO, and recruited Pat Kearns of Exploding Hearts fame to engineer and produce the new record, and the finishing touches are currently being placed�. Cut after cut of hard-edged pop, this LP picks up where the debut and sophomore albums left off and once again demonstrates that, along with brevity, the Clorox Girls know the value of solid songwriting and catchy backing vocals. On the 15 tracks that comprise their newest album (title not yet decided upon), the Clorox Girls have honed their pop edge without losing the sound that harkens back to that peculiar lost-in-time-garage-psych-no-man�s land that birthed Red Cross and the Angry Samoans. It is also quite clear that the Clorox Girls have arrived at a sound of their own. Clorox Girls new album is out on BYO Records April 10th 2007. |
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