And, so, as the '90s edged from early- to mid-, and Riot Grrrls and Girl Power
and Women in Rock put gender on the agenda, Katrina Ford feared she'd
be thought of as a rock-'n'-roll novelty, another token female member
in an era where hype-chasing seemed like so much skirt-chasing. So she
drank and smoked and screeched and screamed, effectively sandpapering
her throat until those vocal cords sounded red and raw, their girlishness
razed away into transgendered roughness. And, with her mighty-uptighty,
right horrorshow combo Jaks belting out blood-splattered anthems sharpened
up to radical angularity, Ford's masculine caterwauling sounded like
more of that totally-'90s Albini-ism. When Ford and her lifetime partner-in-crime
Sean Antanaitis went from Ann Arbor to Baltimore as those '90s went from
mid- to late-, they went from Jaks to Love Life, a crew whose skin-crawling,
slow-crawl piss-bottle-blues created a ruined mood of brooding despair,
their black-heart procession progressing at a funereal gait; amidst all
of this, Ford sounded more ferocious and less feminine than ever, her
vivid voice, in all its screams, the band's greatest weapon in their
bleak renderings of first love/last rites. Celebration come as the latest
installment in the Ford/Antanaitis lineage, this rockband just three-quarters
of the Love Life racket reconfigured and reanimated, back from the dead
worlds they'd spent the last half-decade staking out, bursting out anew
in an explosion of light and color (if of a muted hue), firing fireworks
Celebrating the sheer joy of existence, it being always a good day to
be alive. If Love Life laid you down to sleep, Celebration hope you've
got
those
happy feet; the trio skitters busy percussion/hand-percussion through
their stripped-back, sped-up, Sitek-aided take on those same ghosts and
flowers, the same demons and dreamings, that've always haunted Ford.
As the organs gurgle, and intermittent shards of guitar chime in with
bursts of agitato/agitating noise, and Celebration's celebratory ways
make them play at a pace that makes one able to dance along, Ford is,
as always, a commanding presence, commanding a sort of musical séance
in which past is manifest as present, in which the spirits run high,
in which she spits out/up eerie secrets dredged from deep down beneath
her bloodied teeth, run rough through her ragged throat, and sends them,
screeching, towards the ceiling, on their way up to such heavenly heights,
the whole an exhilarating take on rock-'n'-roll caught, torn, between
striving for the light and reveling in the dark.
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