Gore Gore Girls

Up All Night is album number two from Detroit's Gore Gore Girls. Whereas their first album, Strange Girls, absolutely sizzled with a raw Pandoras meets the New Bomb Turks/Headcoats energy, this one unsuccessfully tries to go further into the '60s girl group/Shangra-Las direction. It's left behind the fuzz and frenzy of the previous album in search of cleaner sounds and big, big vocals. As a result, we can now unfortunately hear that the drums are often quite off time and that the ladies aren't quite the singers they want to be. The result is a band that's trying for a full on pop presentation but doesn't have the chops to pull it off. There is barely any punky charm here at all, which has now been exposed as a big part of their formula. It's also interesting to note that only two of the three band members are pictured in the CD booklet, which bespeaks of some inner-band messiness.