Album Project #2: GATO NEGRO
The unfortunate thing about 7 Year Bitch’s 1996 release Gato Negro is the lyrics. The music that accompanies them is an amalgamation of simple and fuzzy riffs, driven base lines, and drums that are sometimes military-stiff and sometimes rock-heavy. There’s enough feedback and texture to keep a person interested, and Selene Vigil’s voice is a uniformly sweet growl, if a little monotonous.
But there just isn’t any sense in the lyrics. No real sense anyway, no interesting images, no political hyperbole (see, e.g. “Dead Men Don’t Rape,” their 1994 punked-out classic), just the ramblings of someone inarticulately and violently messed up. In “The Midst,” for example, Vigil snarls, “he would have killed me and my friend/ ‘cause that’s how he deals … with pain/ oh god/ I need some chemicals/ I’m too emotional.” Vigil’s account of a potentially fascinating scene becomes a meaningless pile of pop-psychology mush tinged with oblivious despair. Maybe if Vigil had given her chemicals a rest, she would have been perceptive enough to write lyrics worthy Davis’s grizzly music.
