Few singers can locate the rage that lies behind lust like Christina Amphlett of Divinyls. She sings with an eroticism that is almost vengeful, hurling out phrases brimming with violent need. Then she can turn and offer succor, proving there's vulnerability beneath that banshee wail after all.

The wit and power of that wail were greatly hampered on Amphlett's last album with Divinyls –...

And you thought only whimsical, bland bands had joined the Australian Invasion. Meet–if you dare–Christina Amphlett, the pint-size lead singer for this down-under quintet, whose debut album is a fine and feisty piece of rock & roll. Amphlett's banzai vocals fuse the growly conviction of Joan Jett with the frenetic ululations of Lene Lovich for a vocal package that suggests a Sydney-spawn...

The voice of Christina Amphlett, the Divinyls' lead singer, shuttles between a hiccup, a yodel and a snarl. She sings with inflections that seem entirely her own, as if she were making up a perverse language as she went along. At her most bizarre, she can sound almost demonically possessed.

It's a talent wild enough to enliven any album the Australian singer appears on – including one with the...

The Divinyls are not a "safe" band. This Australian quintet's sound is loud and hard edged, as purely physical as any metal band but tempered with the sort of swaggering rowdiness that typifies other Sydney bands like Rose Tattoo or Midnight Oil. Such unrestrained energy is usually enough on its own to make radio programmers and other commissars of commercial consumption wary; add singer Christina...