As a choir of teenage girls turn Judas Priest’s metal classic You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ into a lamentation, the camera searches each blank face, questioning whether the person is sweet or sour, nice or nasty. It’s a scene from Jennifer Reeder’s latest film, A Million Miles Away, which in a shared bill as part of the London short film festival proves a striking introduction when it’s played before a set from equally youthful and inscrutable new group Skinny Girl Diet.
Formed by three Londoners with an obvious passion for riot grrrl, Skinny Girl Diet are what Hole might have sounded like had Courtney Love hailed from Wood Green rather than Portland, Oregon. In fact, lead singer and guitarist Delilah Holliday captures Love’s disaffected drawl and screeching fury eerily well. Their music is soupy, fitful grunge with shades of the Pixies, Bratmobile and the Runaways, and their accounts of the pitfalls of teenage life are sung with a London twang and a subtle spikiness that recalls the Slits.
The band’s PA system, however, obliterates Delilah Holliday’s every word. Her truculent vocals are alive on the friend-baiting tantrum of Burnout, but every pithy putdown is lost under cousin Amelia Cutler’s snaky bass and an increasingly frantic rhythm from sister Ursula Holliday. Wasted Smile, meanwhile, has the siblings’ brooding harmonies set against an epic meltdown that sends Ursula Holliday’s long, poker-straight hair flying against her crashing cymbals. Nothing but the haunting refrain escapes the melee.
The 25-minute set has some exciting moments, such as Prozac Nation. But it’s hard, however, to gauge whether the group’s aloof stage presence is due to studied indifference, insecurity or mere intimidation. The effort they’ve put into their clothes – Delilah wears a quirky trouser suit adorned with slogans and her sister a silver lamé jumpsuit, while Cutler goes for a regulation riot grrrl pinafore dress – suggests they are keen to impress. If only tonight’s sound was as slick as their look.
• At the Shacklewell Arms, London, on 20 January. Box office: 020-7249 0810.
