Cunt
At the Sugar Refinery on Monday, March 17

I don’t recommend gorging on a platter of sashimi right before you feast your eyes on Cunt. For some reason, my dinner companion seemed reluctant to talk about the night’s coming attraction as he slipped a piece of cold, raw, purple-pink tuna between his lips. The term cunt rock, which is how a Sugar Refinery staffer described the band on the phone, conjured up images of angry, feminist punk music, and, therefore, my friend was a little apprehensive about being trapped in the small Granville Street venue with a room full of militant man haters.

But his apprehensions were all for naught. The Refinery crowd looked more like a reunion of UVic dropouts, and the women of Cunt sported no visible body piercings or intimidating bondage gear. In fact, the local quintet could easily have passed for a group of wholesome college-band geeks.

Cunt started things off with a chamber-pop jam. Harmless enough, or so I thought. Shortly thereafter, drummer and lead singer-yeller-squawker Sarah Wheeler built up her nonsensical chants into a crescendo of terrific screeching that sounded as though she was exorcising something jagged and painful from her soul.

As Straight photographer Kevin Statham zoomed in for a nice tight shot of Cunt’s first-song climax, Wheeler started screaming like a Ritalin-jonesing child having a fit in public: “No more pictures, no more pictures.” And then the song came to a crashing end, and the group crept in with what might have been a soundtrack excerpt from Rosemary’s Baby. With Ida Nilsen pounding high-pitched keys on her electric piano and Joyita Rubin sawing away on the cello, the queasy instrumental slowly built, conjuring up the scariest part of most suspense films: when the vulnerable woman decides to confront the killer alone. Just when Cunt seemed totally sonically engorged, the band suddenly whipped out some festive St. Patrick’s Day hats and Wheeler scoffed down a few bites of her dinner.

After some grits, the group carried on with a rather free-flowing, abstract rendition of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It”. The only way you could tell the song had ended was that Wheeler was eventually off again singing in a hysterical yodel. If Cinderella is ever translated into an opera on a Vancouver stage, she’ll have a good shot at landing the role of the evil stepmom. Both reviewer and friend of reviewer were really scared at this point. From there, Wheeler began to cluck at the top her lungs. Who knew chickens were so angry?

Throughout the show, the occasional group of St. Patrick’s Day hooligans would stumble in looking for cheap Guinness, but they didn’t stay long after getting an earful of the shrieking, crowing, and scolding. Go figure.

After the squawking subsided, Cunt melted into a gooey instrumental typical of 4 a.m. celebrity-zodiac infomercials. Then out of nowhere, Wheeler piped in with “This is a bad hair day/Is there a hairdresser in the audience?” Now we’re talking my language. Cunt really isn’t so different from the rest of the gals after all. Oops, spoke too soon. The band’s final parting gift was a weird, mumbling spoken-word thing in which all the Cunts babbled over top of each other, duplicating the social interactions that go on in unsupervised insane-asylum recreation rooms.

Well, what can you do? It was a Monday night. We contemplated staying for the second set but the Refinery blasted a repetitive loop of cacophony that drove us out before we could be seduced back into the folds of Vancouver’s most-celebrated tribute to the beef curtains.