If
Tina Fey
and
Amy Poehler
were twenty-somethings who decided to put together a punk band, the results might have been something like
Childbirth
, which says a great deal about how funny
can be, as well as how cleverly they articulate their witty but very real messages about feminism and contemporary culture.
are clearly not a joke, but they may well be the funniest punk band to emerge in ages, and just as their debut EP
It's a Girl!
delivered bits of comic genius like "I Only Fucked You as a Joke," "Will You Be My Mom?," and "How Do Girls Even Do It?," their first full-length,
Women's Rights
, manages to rock hard and generate plenty of solid laughs along the way with numbers like "Tech Bro" (a paean to having a coder boyfriend who will explain feminism to you), "Siri, Open Tinder" (about the perils of online dating), "Since When Are You Gay?" (in which our protagonist's straight friend starts dating women), "Cool Mom" ("She lets me drink alcohol!....She buys me condoms!"), and "Baby Bump" (best variation on this theme since
Garfunkel & Oates
' "Pregnant Women Are Smug"). While
's lyrics are funny and the humor is often broad, the jokes are never dumb -- there's just enough rage (or at least common annoyance) beneath the surface to remind us these are real world concerns, and like the best humor, the gags ring true as an only mildly distorted version of real life. And while
are proudly punk rock, their stripped-down, deliberately primitive sound has firmed up a bit since
, and guitarist and singer
Julia Shapiro
sounds tougher and more confident here (especially on her guitar), while bassist
Bree McKenna
Stacy Peck
hold down the rhythms with no fuss but a good amount of muscle. Like
Fey
Poehler
,
easily shut down the canard that women (especially feminists) can't be funny, and on
they also show they can crank out some lean, tuneful punk rock, and this album is a smart, unpretentious good time on any number of levels. ~ Mark Deming