If there's a defining document of the riot grrrl movement exploding out of a tiny cult into wider international recognition, it's in this 1993 split EP that featured the most important U.S. and U.K. bands on the scene just before they joined forces for a groundbreaking U.K. tour.
Bikini Kill
were about a year away from their first full-length album, 1994's
Pussy Whipped
, when they cut their seven tunes on a four-track machine in their rehearsal space, but the band already sounds ferociously confident, and the lo-fi chaos of their purposefully stripped-down punk rabble-rousing hits the bull's-eye, especially as an audio clip of an appallingly clueless young man segues into the venomous "White Boy," and when
Kathleen Hanna
declares "That girl acts like she's the queen of the neighborhood/I've got news for you -- SHE IS!" on the ueber-anthemic "Rebel Girl."
also showed they had some pop smarts on the side closer "Outta Me," and if this set isn't the best music in
's catalog, it typifies what made them iconic as well as anything they ever released. On side two,
Huggy Bear
offer up a more nuanced musical approach, with a more focused guitar attack and a willingness to detour into punk-damaged retro-pop on "Blow Dry" and "Aqua Star Girl" and sludgy noise rock on "Into the Mission" and "Nu Song." And the lyrics offer more subtle and thoughtful polemics, though if they're somewhat less ferocious, they don't leave any doubt about how they feel about the politics of gender, and the bitter wrath of the grand finale "February 14th" could pass for
Crass
in dim light. At a time when punk rock women needed a riot of their own, this split LP led the charge, and both the music and the message still sound like top-notch trouble-making decades after the fact. ~ Mark Deming