Also available on vinyl!

Gallhammer isn't the only all-girl Japanese group that I've been infatuated with lately - I just discovered this 2004 album from Ex-Girl recently after years of seeing it around and oogling the garish, wacked out cover with the three Ex-Girls glamour posing in front of a giant stuffed frog, all of them extending paws welcoming you into the lime green vortex of their interstellar rock freakout. That certainly looked enticing, and the label's description made 'em sound like they were going to be a poppier, more theatrical entry into the Japanese progpunk stakes, so I was pretty curious to hear this. It took awhile, obviously...Endangered Species was already out of print at the label when I went searching for it, and stayed that way for awhile, and it took me until a few weeks ago to finally pick up a copy for myself...the wait was worth it though. Ex-Girl floored me with their ultra bombastic, genre-scrambling pop-prog spacemetal psych rock that's somewhere in between Melt Banana, OOIOO, Faith No More and Queen, being performed by a trio of terminally foxy ladies travelling from the far-flung Planet KeroKero. This is the band's fourth album, and it's ostensibly a conceptual rock opera about futuristic civilizations and galactic beings curing hiccups and global shifts in consciousness all told through Kirilola's absurd lyrics. and the sprawling cosmic pop arrangements created largely by the cross-dressing psychedelic guru/God Mountain label head/keyboardist Hoppy Kamiyama, who has been the composer/producer of Ex-Girl since the band first formed. Rich three-part female vocal harmonies and awesome monstrous drumming drives complex and adventurous songs formed from operatic prog, bits of ska, lush Muzak strings, jungle beats, detours into angular metal riffage, new wavey Gary Numan style synths and deep space bleeps and bloops, experimental psych guitar and cosmic drones, with gigantic pop hooks at the core of almost every track on here. Heavy and heavenly, poppy and completely freaked out.