This is a review of "s/t" recorded by Little Match Girl. The review was written by Richard Garnett in 2003.

It takes guts and determination to play unpopular music well, it takes even more courage to take it into a studio and record 14 tracks. It's been a while since my last use of the word "Industrial" in a review, with good reason and now let me add some others in there to truly distinguish LMG in their field - "Thrash", "Metal", "Techno", "Goth", "Hair", "Drum Machines", "Scary as your Gran"...getting the picture?

Fronted by rock vixen Vivian Lady, LMG lay it on thick musically and lyrically. It's humourless bad school poetry put to big noisy nonsense - "Do you wanna know? You're living as they tell you"... I know the system sucks doesn't it? Ironically this is a well-produced labour of love and the whole hog is immaculately delivered from production to packaging, such a pity it sounds like Republica on speed.

Once the initial assault calms down there are some glimmers of hope, usually involving the darker stiller moments that don't employ the 8000 bpm thrash tactics. The intro to "Space Witch" sees some excellent programming and "Satisfaction" has enough about it to hold its head up. But in all the band have watched too many horror movies, had too many stoned discussions about the occult and got through too many bottles of black nail polish to realise the rest of us are not with them against the dark lords of the system.