L7

Forget Bricks Are Heavy; Smell the Magic captures L7 at their squalid, furious, slightly self-parodying best. (Is the title a Spinal Tap reference? You be the judge.) Lyrical quality varies -- bad girls don't give warnings before they shove -- but "Fast and Frightening" makes up for that with lines like "Got so much cl*t/She don't need no balls." And when those sludgy guitars kick in, it sounds like somebody's taking a chainsaw to the recording equipment. Yum. Johnny Thunders may have died penniless and drug-sick, but he left behind a few daughters. Check out the final three bonus tracks.

Generalizing the hostile "Shove" with the balls-to-the-wall "Fast and Frightening," dissecting everybody else's suicidal tendencies on "Deathwish" before joining the fun on "'Till the Wheels Fall Off," humping a "Broomstick" as a preamble to "Packin' a Rod," these clitocentric trouble girls are everything the Runaways were supposed to be. Afraid of nothing including the four-syllable F-word, they go for an obsessive, dirty, punk pop-metal so aggressive it'll scare damn near every sister in sight. But the bravest will grow stronger. Soon they'll tell others. And start their own bands. And conquer the world. Right? (Grade: A)