Album Review: Scatter the Rats by L7

Twenty years after the band closed their breakthrough era with an indefinite hiatus, Los Angeles grunge-punk pioneers L7 staged a comeback with their seventh album, Scatter the Rats. Issued on longtime friend Joan Jett's Blackheart Records, Rats is a nostalgic return to the '90s, cramming crunchy guitars and lurching rhythms into an updated stew of nasty punkabilly bounce, heavy metal muscle, and no-frills rock & roll. Understandably, the ferocity and mayhem of their peak years has since been smoothed out and their approach is somewhat matured, especially with cleaner vocals that reveal co-founder Donita Sparks' relatively polished singing voice.

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More than nineteen years ago, L7 went on "an indefinite hiatus" after putting out their sixth studio album, Slap-Happy, two years prior, to mixed reviews and poor sales. In 2014, the Los Angeles band reunited and are now offering up Scatter the Rats, their first album in 20 years.   Fans of the band's breakthrough 1992 album Bricks Are Heavy will note a few of its similarities to this latest record in sound and spirit — except Scatter the Rats comes off much tamer. L7 do most of what they already know, but do it well.   The best of ….

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Donita Sparks, the fearless vocalist and guitarist for the Los Angeles grunge four-piece L7, likes to trot out a pet sound bite during interviews. "We're a meat-and-potatoes rock band with a conscience and some humor," she told The Current last year. "We just want to [be] meat-and-potatoes L7," she said in 2015, around the time the band embarked on a reunion tour.

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