Bride Of No No
Vocalist and bassist AZ has emerged from the twisted mayhem of her previous project, The Scissor Girls -- a legendary group of Chicago-based No Wave avatars renowned for their eerie and bizarre theatrics -- with a new venture known as Bride of No No. AZ is quick to point out that Bride of No No is definitely a mature group of musical equals and shouldn't be seen as her new backing band. However, Bride of No No does take up many of the Scissor Girls' initiatives, ambitions, and themes, both improving on them and departing from them.
In the six tracks on their new LP, B.O.N.N. Apetit!, Bride of No No regularly sacrifices clarity of expression for seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrical portraits of madness, nebulous clouds of guitars, and the omnipresent backbone of stable drumming and bass. The band enlisted such heavyweights as Elliot Dicks, John Golden, Steve Albini, and Jim O'Rourke to help give the recording the lacerating claws it needs, and you can hear their presence on the album. Bride of No No may evoke memories of God Is My Co-Pilot, UT, Vue (formerly known as The Audience), and obscure Olympia acts like Kreviss with their snarling idiosyncratic narratives which demand you to pick up the liner notes and pore over the lyrics.
Much of the buzz around Bride of No No stems from their live performances and their methods of challenging preconceived notions about identity and assumptions about motivation and ideology. The band has further encloaked its mixture of performance Art Brut and punk noise mayhem in mistique and intrigue by wearing full length tunics to literally mask their identities, performing unnannounced, and using cryptic initials to retain their personal anonymity. Definitely a band with more to communicate than simply their music, Bride of No No promises to continue evolving into a fearsome and irresistible entity.
-Scott Bilby
