Anyone who has recently perused a style magazine cannot have failed to have noticed that those on fashion's trendiest outer reaches are currently overdosing on irony - and music has followed suit. No one seems to have considered the drawback of this approach. If you regard everything with your eyebrow fixed in a knowing arch, people may start looking at you in the same way.
It's a problem that afflicts Munich-based art-school trio Chicks on Speed, favoured by fashionistas the world over. They wear homemade paper dresses. Their "act" largely consists of shouting to a backing tape of techno beats. Yet Chicks on Speed apparently have a point to make: in America, a country not noted for its irony, the trio are taken seriously as feminist polemicists. The plot thickens.
Onstage, it is agonisingly impossible to tell whether they're joking or not. Some of what goes on seems so pathetic that it has to be a joke. But the audience, an uneasy alliance of east London trendies and stern indie feminists, are not laughing. They vigorously applaud an a capella number during which Chicks on Speed repeatedly shriek "Class war does exist! America! America!"
During The Housework Song, they pretend to polish the stage, shouting "I love sewing! It really gives me thrills!" Are they trying to make a point about female oppression, or parodying people who make their point about female oppression in a clunkingly obvious manner? Either way, it's excruciating to watch.
Yet for every moment of puzzling awfulness, the trio come up with something impressive. They remake US alt-rock band Cracker's Eurotrash Girl as blank teutonic disco, turning the sneering original on its head. Glamour Girl, meanwhile, proffers both a writhing house backing and a barbed lyric: "Fashion victim on the air, I shaved off all my pubic hair," they chant. "Sometimes they think I'm vermin, I've got more faces than Cindy Sherman". Given their core audience, it seems as ironic a statement as ever, but this time, at least it's witty and attached to some genuinely inspired music.
