**1/2 Red Aunts

GHETTO BLASTER

(Epitaph)

Give the women in Red Aunts some credit for discovering the alleyway between garage and punk, and for reveling in the sheer dirtiness of their sound. The group's guitar tone brings to mind amps coughing up blood, but they can get an awful lot of mileage out of a single chord, or even a single note -- one guitar lesson would probably be enough to get most people through "The Things You See, the Things You Don't," though the song's squelchy synth line and sneak-attack rhythm belie its simplicity. Ghetto Blaster lacks the laconic rage of earlier Red Aunts CDs -- where their older tunes tended to get to the point in two minutes or less, the new ones try to sustain a groove and hint at the blues, which often just makes the songs drag. And the pissed-off-housewife lyrics on "Poison Steak" don't do justice to the whiplash sneer of the setting. Still, this is the Aunts' most adventurous record, and it's great to hear them trying to get out of the garage-rock dead end. Unfortunately, Ghetto Blaster has turned out to be another kind of dead end for Red Aunts, who recently announced that they're calling it quits.

-- Douglas Wolk