Hardcore Rock & Roll has produced few feminist icons – until now. In the vanguard of thrash are three all-female groups: L7, Babes in Toyland and New York's own Lunachicks. "This Is Serious," from the Lunachicks' second album, Binge and Purge, is a call to arms and a celebration of the endurance of tough-rocking women in a man's world: "Lunachicks make lots of noise/To prove rock & roll's not just for boys." Refreshingly under produced, the album has the ragged purity of a bootleg.

The Lunachicks make what the inimitable host of Wayne's World might term "chick music" – Binge and Purge neatly lives up to the girls-support-group promise of its cover, which features the quartet indulging cravings for cake, chips and Diet Coke in a Russ Meyer-esque scene of excess. The twelve songs deal with eternal female concerns: food and fat obsessions (the title cut), menstruation ("Plugg"), dumping a self-absorbed partner ("2 Bad 4 U"), mothers ("Mom"). And the lyrics, most of them by lead singer Theo, are as sublimely – and grotesquely – unadorned ("Sometimes my finger is all that I need") as the pristine riffs of Gina on lead guitar.

Binge and Purge is available from Safe House Communications, P.O. Box 349, West Lebanon, NH 03784. (RS 653)

JULIA SZABO