** Jucifer

CALLING ALL CARS ON THE VEGAS STRIP

(Capricorn)

To judge by this Athens (Georgia) duo's vaguely evil name, the cop-drama title of their debut album, and the shot of the gun-toting girl on the cover of Calling All Cars on the Vegas Strip, Jucifer have a thing for the transgressive punk-meets-white-trash-metal cartoon world of Frank Kozik poster art. But the songs here recall an even more familiar milieu: the grunge-punk underground of the early '90s, where grrrl-rockers like Hole, L7, and Babes in Toyland first made their mark. In fact, there's something almost quaint about the burly distorted guitars, ominous minor-key chordings, and thundering backbeats that anchor the opening "Code Escovedo," which finds singer/guitarist Amber Valentine sing-screaming "Going down just to get my fill in Hell." In fact, the clouds of dissonance that hover around the power chords help place the tune somewhere in the vicinity of Hole's debut CD, Pretty on the Inside, particularly when we find that Valentine's actually headed for a disco and not the underworld.

At its most generic, Calling All Cars (which was self-released before Capricorn remastered and re-released it this month) sounds like Courtney Love meeting up with L7 in a dark alley. And at their most misguided, Valentine and drummer Ed Livengood deploy some gratuitous hip-hop scratching. But they do make an impressive amount of noise for a duo, and "Hero Worship" -- with its softer, strummed guitars, skewed and sugary vocal melodies, alluring delivery, and repeated refrain "I wanna be like Tabitha Soren/Because I'm not happy with me" -- is a cool Breeders-esque novelty number that would probably get a lot more notice if it weren't stuck in the middle of all that grunge.

-- Matt Ashare

(See Jeffrey's review of a new translation of Hoffmann's novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.)