Brooklyn’s Video Daughters confront you at the
art-rock/post-punk green room afterparty and smash glass bottles on PA they’re
playing through. They’re the band the other bands want to drink to. Heaving
guitar blasts to barely coherent drum machine percussion, the duo, Mike Green
and Ronnie Gonzalez zero in on that grisly antisocial behavior so common in
experimental misfits: innovation. Or wait – not innovation, sacrilege. OK,
sacrilege and innovation, and maybe a little chaos. Look, they’re playing that
guitar with the broken bottle now. There’s blood everywhere.
To say that Video Daughters rip through Cut Back like a hot chainsaw through a
butter statue is only slightly off the mark – it’s more like a hot chainsaw
through another hot chainsaw, with sparks flying off the metal as the two power
tools destroy each other. Agitated as a dial-up tone, Green and Gonzalez swerve
sick atmosphere over the double yellow line like they can’t control the car
metaphor they’re apparently driving now. But that’s OK! Cut Back is a disorienting and abrasive clash of energy and
futility, and the heap of splayed arms and legs and instruments on the floor
after the set, sweaty, exhausted, possibly injured, is the only proof you need
to dive headfirst and dangerously into this tape.
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