Montreal’s AIDS Wolf are an immense onslaught of terrorizing chigger-itch guitar and smash-crash-bash drumming, fronted by a woman who screams and whines like she’s channeling all the PMS in the world. Judging from the handful of songs on their MySpace page–the only music they’ve got available so far–their brand of what’s now embarrassingly called “noise punk” is uncut foamy-mouthed straitjacket rock. Out of nowhere the steel-wool intensity of “Panty Mind” stops cold, and it’s like somebody’s tipping back your head and dabbing at your wounds with a psychedelic pastiche of cymbal gusts, keening vocals, and twiddle-and-heave guitars–and then kicking you back out into the wilderness, dizzy and alone, when the pounding and screaming start again. They sound like teenage dirtbag Hessians just damaged enough to blossom into noise nerds, but in fact singer Chloe Lum and drummer Yannick Desranleau run a pretty successful screen-printing company called Seripop. And actually I think it’s scarier when people who have their shit together get totally out of control. –Liz Armstrong
