INTC - download album - Ziggi Baker

The first thing you notice about ziggiville, apart from their crunching guitar sounds, is ziggi herself. With the voice of an angel who’s been permanently tainted by all life’s torments, her vocals soar over the music on wings of ice and fire, daring you to defy anything she says. The album opens with ‘Ejector Go’ sung as a duet with Gia, and this gives a fairly good idea of what you can expect when you listen to the rest of the album: anger, fury, a personality to grapple with and more balls than ten hard men together. ‘Back to the Beginning’ is one that lends itself easily to classic stadium rock venues: its potential for dedicated moshers is unmistakable and yet it’s not like heavy metal. What makes it heavy is ziggi’s attitude, which is threaded throughout the entire album, knitting all the songs together but still being kept loose enough that they all stand perfectly comfortably on their own.‘Breaks To Learn’ the third track on the album, describes nice people who happen to have become dependent on the white stuff and Deep Deep is, well… It’s… It’s explicit, let me just say that much. Not pornographic-type explicit, but obvious enough unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life and think babies are delivered by storks. ‘Everybody Said It Was’ is by far the heaviest track on i n t c and the one I’ve played practically on loop since the first time I heard it. It brings out the rocker in even the most gentle of souls, irresistibly vibrating the spirit so you have to force yourself not to bop around even in public (I almost found myself doing exactly this on the Tube" not a good plan if you don’t want everyone to stare at you more than they do already). ‘Take Take’ is another track that puts this album on a level with the likes of Skunk Anansie (I’d go so far as to say ziggi’s voice has a power not unlike that of Skin and certainly as much KA-POW). Not the longest track on i n t c, it makes up for this in guts and sarcasm (just listen) and was clearly written for anyone who has ever been dumped on. Why anyone would dump on ziggi, I couldn’t possibly fathom (no one would ever dare) but, as with all of her lyrics, it comes straight from the heart.