Marie listens to Huggy Bear so you don’t have to
I’d never listened to Huggy Bear because their name is stupid, so I assumed they suck. However, I finally gave them a chance for the sake of this journal and it turns out that I was right all along: they do kind of suck indeed. Riot grrrl can be great, but you need either a vocal force of nature like Kathleen Hanna or Corin Tucker, or an endearingly sloppy mess that happens to be barrels of fun like the Frumpies or Emily’s Sassy Lime (or you need to be clever, like Bratmobile). Huggy Bear has none of these things, so what’s left is an uninspired mess. Somebody really should have told them that arbitrary noise and dissonance doesn’t make your music interesting. The noise lacks bite too, it’s like a Chihuahua: obnoxiously aggressive but unthreatening. The guy who sings is so bad even the charm of his slight speech impediment (he lisps) can't save him. The fact that he’s a guy is no excuse: the great Fred Schneider has proven that guys can pull off riot grrrl singing(*). At some point, on an album called
Taking the Rough With the Smooch (yikes) this nerd decides that he should do a spoken word track. What the **** is his problem? Of course it's a pretentious trainwreck. The one exception to Huggy Bear's suckiness is
High Street Jupiter Supercone (?), which gets thrashiness right and is actually danceable.
Fun facts:
- They once did a split LP with Bikini Kill: the first half is Huggy Bear’s, and the Bikini Kill half is actually the second of
The First Two Records. The relief one feels when Bikini Kill’s
White Boy finally kicks in is unspeakable.
- Ok so allegedly one of the band members once bit someone in the face, that’s actually pretty rad
choice track:
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