Hailing from Montreal, Taxi Girls are a four-piece garage punk band whose attitude, song-writing nous, and wide-ranging alt/punk list of influences makes them one of the coolest bands to come across SonicAbuse’s desk in some time. Their debut album, Static, brings together thirteen brilliant, almost obscenely addictive tracks, for a record that you’ll have on repeat for months to come.
The album kicks off with Say It! a brilliant anthem that takes the best bits from Hole, Veruca Salt (circa Eight Arms To Hold You), Linoleum, and Elastica, welding them into a snappy, sub-three-minute anthem that will have you hooked. This song alone makes it apparent how Taxi Girls earned slots with the likes of NOFX, The Hives, Lagwagon, and Billy Talent, and it comes as no surprise either that their obvious passion caught the attention of Iggy Pop. Put simply, this is real music in an era of artifice and it sounds bloody brilliant.
No less impressive is Try Harder, which has a wiry bass line, a hint of White Stripes garage stomp, and a boatload of punk-infused attitude. Having got the album off to a cracking start, Taxi Girls hit you square between the eyes with an absolute pop gem. Titled Red Flag Crush, it has it all – Pixies-esque guitar squalls, massed vocals, an insistent beat, and the sort of melody that you’ll be singing for weeks. It’s followed by Auto Hysterics which, somewhat unexpectedly, sounds like a young Courtney Love fronting the Meat Puppets. Gritty but with cheeky fifties’ harmonies thrown into the mix, it’ll leave you with an almighty grin on your face.
It’s time for some ramshackle indie-pop next, the band perfectly capturing that sense of nostalgia you feel when you think back to that first little place you shared with someone you love. Sun kissed, but with a punky undercurrent, So Quaint is the sort of beautifully emotive music I didn’t think bands made any more, firmly cementing my view that this is one of the best, most wonderfully heartfelt albums I’ve heard all year.
One of the album’s most immediate songs, Midnight Mixtape is an obvious single, which does much to capture Elastica’s studied insouciance and, as with the opening track, I feel morally obliged to warn you that it will live in your head rent free for a long time to come. Then, just in case you have any doubt as to the band’s rock credentials, there’s the stabbing fury of Kill Your Darlings which pairs the raw-throated delivery of Kathleen Hanna with the harmonic overload of early Pixies. Of course, Taxi Girls are too busy having fun to worry if you’re following or not and so, just to keep you on your toes, Secret Handshake nods to the melody of 99 Luftballoons before the band whiplash back into frenetic punk with the blitzkrieg rock of It Makes Me Think.
A very different piece awaits as the album edges towards its end for, with the aid of a fizzing symth, Taxi Girls wave cheerily to Robert Smith with Highs // Lows. In contrast, Dark Tie has the emotional punch Linoleum were always so good at weaving into their fizzy anthems. A stabbing Don’t Leave Me Hanging may just be the album’s angriest song, with a lyric that surely speaks to anyone who’s been in an on-again-off-again relationship. It leaves the gloriously unfiltered Other Heart to wrap the album up on a touch of heart-break-turned-cathartic delivered with such raw authenticity you wonder if it’s all going to fall apart on tape.
That’s it – I’m a believer.
Over the course of thirteen songs, Taxi Girls singlehandedly raided my CD collection and reminded me of bands that I have loved across the decades. Not that it’s derivative – far from it. The band simply no how to interpolate the best bands to have come before them while putting their own spin on things. It’s the sort of album that deserves to be unearthed by scruffy indie kids whose passion, even in this digital era, is to spend their weekends in the record store digging through the crates until they find that one thing that they know (despite never having heard it) is going to be their soundtrack for the month. Hell, my only regret is to have heard this for the first time on a digital format rather than on vinyl – where it surely belongs – because there never really is that physical connection with the music you get from holding a record while you listen.
Whatever. With Static, Taxi Girls reminded me why I write, why I still believe in the power of music to lift away the years, and why I will always favour a raw recording over something that has been polished into anodyne conformity. Brash, bright, and with a ludicrous number of ear worms spread throughout, Static is fucking brilliant – now go buy a copy. 10/10
