Girls Like It Loud review by Crawdaddy Magazine

Album Review: Care Bears on Fire, Girls Like It Loud

Dan Weiss

Care Bears on Fire
Girls Like It Loud
(S-Curve, 2010)
The reason the gimmick of kid stars will never die is because kids will never stop being innocent, and we as Western citizens constantly need to know, update, and sometimes love what that innocence entails and signifies for the future generation. Take Justin Bieber: Even his teenybopper fans know he’s not doing anything new, they just think it’s cool that someone so young, innocent, and relatable is harnessing a contemporary sound. In Bieber’s case, he triangulates Usher, auto-tune, and Justin Timberlake, signifiers of groove and snazz. When New Kids on the Block did it, it was new jack swing, while Kriss Kross took the synth squeal of cop-threatening g-funk and juxtaposed it with missing the bus.
But then you have Roxanne Shante, the Runaways, Annabella Lwin—kids born or trained to shock as their means of delight. Care Bears on Fire fall about 2/3 on this side of the fence, and 1/3 on the Justin Bieber side. Why? Because for all the sneer of high schoolers with the pedigree to cover Le Tigre songs, at that age they really just want to be role models. It’s for this reason that Care Bears on Fire’s Sophie, Izzy, and Jena won’t get the respect they deserve from the punk torchbearers. It’s also the reason they deserve it. That, and their ability to play at least as well as L7 at twice their age.
For shock, one of their debut songs was called “Met You on MySpace”, a song about child predators performed, at the time, by 12-year-olds. The clincher was that the metaphor they used for the song’s villain in kid clothing was a unicorn. You know, the creature distinguished by that pointy thing. Yet it was neither particularly bold nor ridiculous; it was child molestation—the unthinkable—being treated by children as a fact of life. Which might also explain why they won’t be gracing any albums in nude a la Annabella Lwin any time this century.
The new Girls Like It Loud EP sounds less like kids, making it easily their most tolerable record (and I bet the next one is even better) and more subtle than preachy. “ATM” seems like a reasonable demand that they shouldn’t have to buy their friends, but in the context of kids in a recession it could totally wash as a warning for the next generation: We’re not putting up with that shit. The opening Sleater-Kinney-styled “What I Could Be” addresses an amazing uncovered topic for punk: How those crushed dreams when you get older start out as ridiculous eight-year-old proclamations like “I want to be an astronaut!” Because kids are born dreamers, it’s admittedly awesome to hear the PG-13 act of rebellion that tears them down as stupid. “Ask Me How I Am” is so blunt and on-the-money you might even believe they’ve held summer jobs. These three best themes of their career are fortified by the two best melodies of it, both covers predating the girls themselves: A gender-switch of Marbles’ glammed-out “Red Lights” and a fantastic wind-up of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Even as an ardent defender of teen-pop, I still somehow doubt Justin Bieber, even with a year on these ladies, will prove this incisive or tuneful on his next record.