Dynasty Handbag Issue #30

Foo Foo Yik Yik (Lovepump United)

By Kat Long
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Dynasty Handbag is the alter ego of Jibz Cameron, a performance artist-vocal acrobat mash-up whose signature look includes smeared makeup, leotards, and stirrup pants she dug out of the trash, and a stare just this side of deranged. 

In live performances, she’s mesmerizing, like a train-wreck in slow motion — in a good way. Using a drum machine and primitive-sounding synthesizers as a musical backdrop, she reveals her mind’s landscape with movements and dialogue so subtle and devastating that one can only laugh nervously and wait for the fireworks to go off. 

Cameron cut her teeth in Bay-area punk trios Dynasty and the Roofies, but Foo Foo Yik Yik marks her departure from a discernable genre of music. The majority of the tracks on this debut clock in at only two-and-a-half minutes, but consistently pack in tinny, mid-tempo rhythms, a few keyboard noodles, and totally unhinged wailing. Regrettably, each track sounds interchangeable except “Oh Baby,” a bizarre love song in which Cameron laments, “When you walk in the room, my skin crawls, my heart jumps out, it falls to the floor, I run for the door.” The album’s highlight is an electro-sludgey cover of the Stooges’ “Open Up and Bleed,” a bona fide song in an array of discordant blips and shrieks. 

Without the necessary visual aids — the crazy expressions, the gold stretch pants — Foo Foo Yik Yik’ s minimalist compositions just can’t translate the insanity of Dynasty Handbag. The effect is like a Christian Lacroix pantsuit unfortunately paired with Keds.