By Bob Pomeroy
Eliza Geirsdottir doesn't like me.
in the UK. I saw her band Bellatrix play at the Border Crossing Festival in Amsterdam. I was instantly captivated. The four women who make up Bellatrix front line look like a cross section of post Riot Grrrl rock types. The butch bass player Kidda is countered by the ultra cute Pixieness of singer, violinist Eliza. Keyboard player Sigrun and guitarist Anna have that Sleeter-Kinny look about them while Karl the drummer has a bit of Brad Pitt about him. Being visually striking don't mean a thing if the music isn't there. The bouncy pop rock coming off the stage at De Bali was what captured me. The music was just so damned fun that I had to stay.
attempts to do an e-mail interview failed. I can't blame Fierce Panda or the band's manager. They both tried to hook me up. Normally, that would be the end of the story. If you don't want to talk
to me, I won't bother writing about you. I'm going to go ahead and tell you what I've learned about Bellatrix just to be contrary. The quotes that appear in this article are nicked from their on-line press kit.
Bellatrix are a young band. Everyone in the group is in their 20's. That doesn't mean Bellatrix is a new band. Eliza and Sigrun formed Bellatrix, then known as Kolrassa Krokridandi, back in 1992 when they were just sixteen years old. The band played anywhere they could and started recording on their own. The young band even made several early and generally unsuccessful attempts to tour in Europe. When you live in a country with a population of only 270,000 people, you have to look elsewhere if you're ambitious.
In 1995, Bellatrix spent a summer in Chicago making a disc for Bad Taste Inc./Feel Good All Over. I remember being in Chicago that summer and hearing about these Icelandic girls who were running wild over at John Henderson's place. Maybe Eliza didn't want me dredging up stories of alcohol fueled exploits of sex, petty vandalism and rock and roll. This is all the press kit has to say about their stay in the Windy City; "At one particularly jovial point in the past they found themselves in Chicago stealing toilet paper and drinking The Mekons' Tequila. All of it."
"It's All True is the first time I didn't cry when I heard the finished record,' confesses Eliza. 'Over in Iceland we were always going 'Waaaah!! That's soooo bad!'. This time I just blushed for an hour and said 'That's my voice!'. Hee hee hee!. The disc that came out of their summer in Chicago is called Stranger Tales and it's long out of print. I did score a used copy on line, and it's not bad. It's a
little raw, a bit low-fi and I know the label was hoping to capitalize on some Sugarcubes buzz. The songs are pretty good, the performance are nicely energetic and the sound is little more folk rock than the new material. I do like the fact that they sing some of the songs in Icelandic. Stranger Tales is nothing to be ashamed of.
So the attempt to conquer America didn't go so well. Bellatrix turned their sights on the smaller, more accepting and highly influential UK market. The group hooked up with Fierce Panda records to release they consider to be their first real album, It's All True. Eliza, who as well as playing violin is also an operatically trained singer, once described Bellatrix as 'classical idiots'. You hear that reflected in the keyboards, violins and especially Eliza's dynamic vocal range. One of the joys of Bellatrix songs are the delightfully skewed lyrics. The press kit puts it this way," The music isn't so much boy-meets-girl as girl-meets-boy-and-throws-him-around-the-room-for-a-bit, all spikey edges and physical thrills, but the attitude behind it remains blithely relaxed." I couldn't have said it better. "The Girl With the Sparkling Eyes" reduces males to drooling fools. (Draw your own conclusions about this author if you wish).