CD Review

Betty's Trash: "beauty sleep"

By Dan Century

Two nubile young women are sprawled out of the hood of a compact car. One woman is making definite manual contact with the other woman's chest. Next to the car is a large uncovered refuse container. Is this a scene from a Sarah Michelle Gellar teen slasher flick or perhaps the Talk Soup "clip of the week?" No. Surprisingly it's the photocopied and lipstick imprinted cover of the new Betty's Trash four-song demo tape entitled beauty sleep. The women on the cover are obviously "trash," they definitely sleep with each other and they may even be beautiful (it's hard to tell due to trashy photocopy quality). Excellent.

After a quick listen to the demo it's easy to tell what these Betty's Trash individuals are into: S&M, "watersports," filth, self mutilation, bleeding, making other people bleed, suffering and a whole lot of drugs and sex. Check out their names: King James, Valkrie, TrevorG, "Uh-Nasty-Uh," Angel and Apostrophe. How many visits to the Smurf Village do you make before your name becomes a punctuation mark?Betty's Trash are obviously no strangers to the hospital emergency room: "What's it this time? An abortion? Gerbil? Oh, I see, Angel is turning blue again. Somebody get a stomach pump STAT!"

It's obvious that this King James is some sort of inbred whyte trash pimp daddy ringleader - growling his sadistic confessions while his stable of slut baby junkies gyrate around him. Valkyrie, the queen-bee of the group, is no better - she's heavy into beating, cutting, emasculation and I'm guessing the occasional castration. This is definite Springer Show fodder.

By now you must be wondering what they sound like. Well, they sound kind of like My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - pre-disco Thrill Kill Kult. Betty's Trash takes some creepy synths, raspy guitars, Jenny Jones samples and a whole lot of B-movie / serial killer vocals, tosses them in a dumpster and pours them out onto a Fe02 cassette. In the immortal words of Ash: "Groovy." The Android Lust remix of Miscarriage is a real sweet track: lots of samples crashing into each other making for a real trance inducing experience. The live track, Fake It, is the real standout on the tape - after hearing it I definitely want to see them live. I imagine they put on a real sick and twisted show.

Betty's Trash needs to spend some bucks (sell some drugs, sell some ass, come on, you can do it) on production and put out some songs in a digital format. This lo-fi shit has to go. They need to build the strength of their vocals and rely less on F/X ... and the synth riff on Tweekin' Tami gets annoying after a few listens. Betty's Trash has creamy loads of potential and enough talent to take them where they want to go (which is probably straight to hell). I wish them only the best. I want to mention that I totaled my brand new car while listening to this tape. Coincidence? Maybe. Pig fuckers...