Pitchfork

Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're flashing back to the heyday of grunge and remembering that in their prime, L7 were mediocre and had but one half-decent album. You're amazed that they're still together and you can't imagine them having anything to contribute to the current music scene. You're guessing that this record stinks. And you're right.

L7's contribution to gender equality was to show that women, too, could form bands as terrible as Candlebox. They never rocked all that hard and they rarely showed any feel for melody, but they did have a clever streak that made Smell the Magic and (to a lesser extent) Bricks are Heavy tolerable. But whatever fuel powered them through five previous studio albums had long been spent by the time they sat down to make Slap-Happy. Now they seem like they're just trying to stay in the game long enough to get a pull-quote in Rolling Stone's next "Women in Rock" feature. They may not make it.

When I'm forced to listen to brainless metal, I pray it will be either powerful or fun; L7 is neither. Their sludgy riffery-- which is never heavy enough to be intimidating, or catchy enough to be interesting-- is so easy to ignore that Slap-Happy almost qualifies as ambient music. Songs like "Crackpot Baby" feature stilted melodies that follow the rote changes so closely you'd swear they were written by a 10-year-old. The few stabs at humor, as demonstrated on tracks like "On My Rockin' Machine" and "Lackey," fail to generate a single lighthearted moment. There are also a couple of embarrassing attempts to update the style with tweaked-out production and trip-hop beats. The regrettably titled "Livin' Large" includes the line, "We got some lemons, we're going make some kick-ass lemonade," and L7 repeat it twice. Enough already! If you're feeling nostalgic, go get the Motley Crue live album. At least they were the real deal once.