Sun City Girls

AMG Review of Sun City Girls

Patrick Foster
All Music Guide

The now-forgotten Phoenix, AZ label that brought the world the rote hardcore stylings of JFA also launched the recording career of the Sun City Girls. The trio's self-titled 1984 debut sounded nothing like their labelmates and not much like anything else at the time. The closest parameter might have been the early, desert-damaged work of the Meat Puppets, but even at this early stage the Girls were smearing ethnic musics ("Black Tent," "Helwa Shak") with their own sardonic, twisted, and sophisticated world view ("Rappin Head," "The Burning Nerve Ending Magic Trick") like few artists before or since. The fact that the band had been recording more or less constantly since they coalesced from the ashes of a band called Paris, 1942 -- whose drummer was none other than Maureen Tucker, late of the Velvet Underground -- had already made the Girls a whirling dervish, and several tracks here, including "Caravan of Scars," became staples to which they would consistently return. This eponymous 17-song record certainly doesn't attain the soaring avant-garage world music sting of their best 1990s efforts, but it is important as both a fine place to wade into the SCG gene pool and as a historical marker, signifying the official onset of the group's magnificent recorded legacy.