Girls Against Boys - Tropic of Scorpio

Year: 1992
Genre: Noise Rock

Highlight Tracks: "Wow Wow Wow", "Plush",
"Everything I Do Seems To Cost Me $20"

Consider this my official petition to get this album remastered and reissued.

This album is an incredible document in the development of Girls Against Boys as a band. It features "safety's off" machine-gun creativity with the band going in a million directions at once. The songs roll into each other with an unstoppable kinteic energy that takes the listener through its 31-minute run-time in the blink of an eye.

The rythmn section hold the whole ball of energy together; rocking deep bass-lines and scattershot drumming through-out. The bizarre vocal performances add a sense of cool to the whole thing, but also include such fun high-pitched asides that its almost self-deprecating at times. Singer, Scott McCloud, sounds pretty young here but you can catch hints of the wizened, cynic of later albums that he would turn into after a few more bourbons. The production wraps the album in a nice level of fuzzy noise so that even the quiet numbers sound like they have a million things going on at once. GVSB sound like they went into this album open to any and all ideas and they packed as many into it as possible.

The one-two punch of album highlights "Plush" followed by "Everything I Do Seems To Cost Me $20" is worth the price of admission alone. The rest of the album features an amazing array of drenched in cool noise rock that should also be taken seriously. To some the album may come across as unfocused (since GVSB tightened up a lot on later releases) but to me this shotgun blast works like a messy little masterpiece.

As a debut full-length this album showed a ton of promise and Girls Against Boys spent most of the 90's living up to that early potential with a catalog of amazing albums.

Their debut definitely could benefit from a volume boosting remastering as it played kind of low on my stereo and in the car. Such unique and exciting instrumentation deserves to be heard with better sound quality and volume.