Audio By Carbonatix
This summer the Warped Tour featured an onstage man-to-woman ratio of approximately 876-to-2 (unless I’m wildly overestimating the female presence, a definite possibility). So the tour’s founders have hatched the Girlz Garage as a way to tip the scales back to something approaching balance, which is wise and welcome and might turn out to be a pretty good way to make a buck during the fall tour season. Or perhaps not: Where’s the marquee attraction? A Liz Phair or a Pink or a Missy Elliott or even a Donnas to draw the casual magazine browsers and the distracted channel surfers? Sadly, the Garage is without such an anchor, leaving the heavy lifting to Canadian pop-rockers Lillix, whose great Matrix-produced sub-Avril demi-hit “It’s About Time” can’t even redeem the rest of Falling Uphill, the band’s downhill debut, let alone a multi-hour traveling girl-power road show. Also on the bill: U.K.-based party-starters Brassy, known to many as Jon Spencer’s little sister Muffin’s band, loved by few for the partially self-produced sub-Peaches racket on new album Gettin Wise; post-Stefani L.A. new wavers theSTART; and Lennon, a black-clad Tennessee homegirl who roars through tortured nü-metal drama Tori Amos could dig. Smartly obnoxious Long Island hip-hop trio Northern State were originally a part of the package, and though they wouldn’t have given this tour the heft it needs, their formal variety would have helped. Warped, isn’t it?
