The Slits - Return Of The Giant Slits

Thanks largely to riot grrl revisions of canonistic punk history and the patronage of Kurt Cobain, most alt rockers who know their onions know their Cut, the 1979 debut by teenage tearaways The Slits. The common (patronising) spiel is that they were best raw and untutored, and as they developed, the excitement was lost. Fortunately, Blast First Petite know better, and have rereleased 1981’s excellent Return Of The Giant Slits, which moved from girlish concerns like shoplifting, breakups and angry teenage feminism into a broader, tribal-influenced post-punk primitivism, sounding somewhere between The Pop Group and playschool music hour. The standout is Earthbeat, a mesmerising Afrobeat/dub/punk meander. Or What It Is?, meanwhile, is a honest reflection on the confusing flipside of Cut’s gleeful reconstruction of femininity. The bonus disc provides some remarkably modern-sounding dub reworkings and a patience-testing contemporary US radio “interview”, consisting mainly of The Slits shrieking down the line at callers. The same defiantly annoying girlish humour is evident in the wonderful Anton Corbijn photographs of the girls in Death Valley on the new sleeve: staring irreverently at the camera, Viv Albertine apparently wearing socks in her hair, brilliantly contrasting with Corbijn’s po-faced U2 Joshua Tree shots in the same landscape six years later.