*REVIEW*

Chicks On Speed at the Annandale Hotel, Sydney

Chicks On Speed, a Berlin-based trio consisting of one German, one American and an Aussie - all girls, all dancing, if not exactly all-singing - have been peddling their patchy wares for the last five years or so. Part band, part fashion line, part record label and part harmless art prank, they're happy to be called pretentious (inasmuch as anybody's "happy" to be called anything) and seemingly overjoyed to be onstage here at the Annandale. They shout, they bounce, they show off their fluorescent make-up and flounce around the stage, posing like the teenagers they're not and, at one especially surreal point, cleaning the stage with brooms and mops. And then they shout some more.

To be honest, Chicks On Speed's music - rudimentary electro with an accidentally vogueish synthpop trim - is hardly of any import: It's all about art and sloganeering statements and FUN, maaan, and the net result looks like a French & Saunders sketch gone horribly, horribly wrong...with special guest star, Kim Wilde. Not really, but you get the idea. With mock-provocative songs like "Procrastinator" and "We Don't Play Guitars", CoS are in their element in this roomful of irony-overdosed art school hipsters; the girlz, in particular, lap up every daft moment.

It’s all fun and games, certainly, and the late appearance of a giant, Terry Gilliam-esque inflatable four-breasted caricature laydee certainly puts the Chicks in a different league to, say, Coldplay in the race for a memorable evening. But – not unlike the infinitely superior Le Tigre, CoS labelmates in Europe – CoS’s presence ressurrects on of the Great Sad Truths of music, that no matter how much a band has to say, and no matter how valid the points being made, if the music isn’t memorable, or at least competent, nobody’ll bother listening. File under: whelming.