Kicking off Love Sick Pleasure with a big, brazen bang, wacky waif Katie Jane Garside declaims the tart anti-record-label diatribe “Love Your Money” in a slightly distorted little-girl-gone-vicious vocal pout atop the chunky bed of Richard Adams’ fuzz bass and songwriter Crispin Gray’s gnashing punk guitar. As acidly enjoyable as a lemon-sour candy, the London quartet happily recalls the loud, noisy hijinks of X-Ray Spex and the Slits while prefiguring poppier bands like Elastica. “Pink Flower” throbs like a runaway train, breathless and unsettled, before devolving into a sweet, strange dirge, harried by chirping effects; the EP is rounded out by the brief, blistering “Sick of Sex,” “All the Kids Agree” and seven chaotic minutes in “Room Eleven.”
The full-length Eleventeen reprises “Love Your Money” and “Pink Flower,” adding more of the same wailing fuzz-punk (“Dog with Sharper Teeth,” “I Feel Insane”). Variations include the acoustic guitar plunkings and running-water sounds making up “Natural Man” and the eerily ambient “Use Me Use You.” “Everything Is Weird,” indeed. Garside’s departure before a second album could be recorded ended the group.