If there's nothing sexier than a girl who is angry and horny, imagine two of them: one wields a fiddle, the other a dildo.
Of course, that's not all that Bitch and Animal are; these two charming ladies have a great many faces and even more euphemisms for the female anatomy. And Eternally Hard, the duo's second album and first outing on Righteous Babe, draws the solid line between "girl power" and "tit rock."
At its most renegade, Eternally Hard sounds like two Brooklyn girls rummaging through storehouses of instruments, picking out as much musicality as their four hands can muster at once while improvising rhymes, wails and shouts about whatever is on their minds. But a closer look at Bitch and Animal's lyrics points to a very surprising maturity and sophistication despite a sound so loosely haphazard that it tries its mightiest to sound decidedly unsophisticated. (Rhymes like "May your crotch never itch/ May you always be a bitch" can only have come from hours of carefully labored artistry.)
Even amidst the carefree fun and ever-growing entropy of songs like "Best Cock on the Block" (a tribute to the greatest of all prosthetic toys) and "Prayer to the Sparkly Queen Areola" (a tribute to... well...), softer, more sensitive songs creep in softly and momentarily take hold of these girls' wild, sex-and-pot-driven mood swings.
The contrasts are often jarring--jumping from love to dildos to getting high in church (OK, so maybe those aren't such distant jumps after all) gives the album a few too many identities. But when complemented with instrumentation so diverse and original that steel nails and tongue clicks add just as much as djembes and didgeridoos, each song sounds uniquely funky and uniquely unquiet.
Enjoy it with friends, or by yourself. They advocate both.
