Atop California’s Central Valley, Chico is part cowtown/part collegetown. For years it was known as a party mecca, with one of the best colleges to go to if you wanted to major in Girls Gone Wild. But even with the college, Chico is a sleepy town where time has seemed to stop. Every once in a while a rock band of note pops up (70s private press, semi-legend Peter Berkow, Barbara Manning’s 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Orland’s the Nothing People) and even these bands seem to exist in a time-vacuum. Dirty Sister was one of these bands.
Composed of two sisters and two guys, Dirty Sister stomped around Chico for a few years in the mid-00’s. The kids loved them, older Chico-ites like Barbara Manning kept tabs on them, but they never penetrated outside their dusty old town. Too bad. Trapped in farmland, Dirty Sister dipped into old Black Sabbath records, soaked up the Runaways, and found the melodic, musical side of GG Allin. Put it in a jar, shake it up with teen-girl singer snot-angst, then pour it into an analogue studio and you get Dirty Sister’s one and only LP.
Recorded in 2006, Dirty Sister is a fine slab of energetic hard rock, with the sound that haunts good 70s Midwestern private press rock albums, heavy but not too heavy, pop-sense but still with some amateurism, in other words, good, solid, guitar driven rock & roll (Runaways, GG Allin, and Larry Weiss get nods here, too). Put a Cherie Currie-obsessed teenling in front and we proclaim: Keeper. Unfortunately, as soon as Dirty Sister’s debut was released, the band broke up, the guitarist fleeing to the big city of Sacramento, with the pressing of 300 and shoved the records in his closet.
We at S.S. busted open the closet and snatched this fine record. We threw out 100 copies that damaged through mishandling. The guitarist kept some for himself and we have the rest for sale. So figure this as a 200 ltd, red vinyl hard rocker in screened sleeves. And once they are gone, they are gone.
Dirty Sister - Mama's Boy by S. S./ Sol Re Sol Records
Dirty Sister - Russian Hands Roman Fingers (edit) by S. S./ Sol Re Sol Records
Dirty Sister - Blackmail (edit) by S. S./ Sol Re Sol Records
