The Bastard Fairies

I would have never known about The Bastard Fairies except that Playboy's web site, in a feature called "Women on the Verge," featured their lead singer and lyricist, a stunningly beautiful woman named Yellow Thunder Woman. She is a full-blooded Yankton Sioux, and though Playboy didn't run any pictures of her naked, she came damn close.

Now, buying music based on the singer's appearance is pretty fucking stupid, but I don't profess to always exercising the best judgement in these matters. So I put their album on my Amazon wish list and finally bought it (one can download their music for free on their web site, but I'm too technologically retarded to do so, so I stick to the tried and true compact disc). It's pretty good.

The band consists of Yellow Thunder Woman and a Brit, Robin Davey, who writes the music and plays the instruments. Davey's music isn't particularly sophisticated--it's a lot of melodies that could be plinked on toy pianos, or heard in music boxes, but damn if he doesn't mix some juicy hooks. He also steals from himself: the songs "We're All Going to Hell" and "Exoskeleton" are essentially the same tune.

But this is really Yellow Thunder Woman's show. I mean, to have a beautiful, alt-rock girl Indian singer is pretty remarkable, but she's also quite the individual thinker. She seems to delight in a lot of provocative verbal bomb throwing, such as A Case Against Love: "Love is a thing that comes from fear, of being alone, of dying alone. Just an over complicated commitment to a bag of bones." Or a song called Maybe She Likes It, which is the chorus of a song about a battered woman. Is she saying that some women like to be beaten up, or is she protesting the attitudes of those who say she would?

A DVD was included with some raw videos, and it's clear that she's a supreme iconoclast, hating religion. The most catchy song is We're All Going to Hell, a ditty that basically says we're all hell-bound and we might as well enjoy it. The title song, Memento Mori, reminds us that we're all going to die (and then we'll go to Hell, I guess). She includes a chorus of "Eat, drink and be merry." I'm not sure if she knows this, but that's not an exactly original sentiment, and goes back to the Bible.

So anyway, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover and hot girls do make good records. I have no idea if The Bastard Fairies will ever expand upon being an Internet-based group, but they are certainly interesting to listen to.