Rid of Me (possibly named for the PJ Harvey album) is a fantastic punk band with an aggressive, throwback style. On their debut album Traveling, the group drags you back into the '90s grunge era of punk with naturally muscular guitars, great greasy grooves, devastating low-end distortion, and tales of cataclysmic psychic collapse conveyed with fitting levels of drama through heaving, soul-souring vocals. I usually try to avoid comparing bands where a woman is the vocalist exclusively to other bands where this is also the case, but with Rid of Me's, it's clearly warranted. Singer Itarya Rosenberg sounds intimidating and commanding, an incredible modern cipher for Courtney Love's overwhelming and plangent wail. Her spiteful profile is backed by the sky-splitting, melancholia afflicted, L7-esque thunder of Mike McGinnis, Mike Howard, and Kyle Matt's. Like the alt. era acolytes of yonder year, Rid of Me is capable of giving personal failures and the punishing nature of individual anxieties the reach of foundational folk legends- their truths become your truths at the moment they cross the threshold between their instruments and your ears. Rid of Me will make your hair and skin ripple and perspire as your body and mind are ravaged by the pensive clamor and cleave of the dark and defiant scythe "I Don't Wanna," while "Spilling," with its whiplash key changes and twisting grooves, will work you over like your grandmother beating the dirt out like an old throw rug. There aren't really moments of reprieve on Traveling as much as there are points where the band's Sisyphean, rock hauling shove gives way to brooding passages of writhing angst such as on the bubbling tar-pit of resentment "23" or the seething series of exhales and weighted trough of deception that is "True (Blue)." You won't be able to quit the feeling that the place you've journeyed to with Rid of Me on Traveling is the last place you'll ever be, but such is the strength of their profound, apocalyptic catharsis.
