You know that bit in Spinal Tap where the band can’t understand why there’s a problem with their Smell the Glove album cover featuring a naked woman on all fours with a dog leash round her neck being forced to smell a glove?

You know, it’s the part where Nigel Tuffnell says “What’s wrong with being sexy?” to replies of “No, sex-ist”. I think we’ve just found the point (again) where life imitates art (again) and history repeats itself (again).

Colt 44 have an eponymous EP out. It’s a loud, brash return to old school grunting rock that will pound upon your eardrums with little remorse.

There’s two speeds here: fast and warp factor, bat out of hell, Usain Bolt on amphetamines lunacy fast. Boy do these guys know how to rock, roll, crash, burn and generally set your brain on fire with a decent tune.

Right. That’s the good bit over. No doubt there’s a soundbite somewhere in the above that Colt 44’s marketing people may care to use as they see fit. The next bit? Not so much.

For while Colt 44 are all those things and more, it could be said (and dammit, I think I will say it) that their songs are just a little bit sexist (that’s sexist, Tuffnell, definitely not sexy). Which is, I suppose, all part of the tradition of this brand of heavy rock - and precisely the kind of thing Spinal Tap satirised (remember Derek Small’s opinion that “Working on a Sex Farm” was a “sophisticated view of the idea of sex”).

But then I’d kind of hope maybe attitudes towards women (even testosterone filled libidinous grunt rocking attitudes to women) would have changed since the days of Steven Tyler proclaiming himself “the Lord of your thighs”. It’s just a little bit old fashioned and wrong.

In the short space of four songs and 12 and a half minutes, Colt 44’s EP covers threatening a cheating woman and her partner in cuckolding crime with a gun (the inspiration behind the band’s name, perhaps?) in “Desperate Measures”, the desire to “beat seven shades of shit” out of a girl who mistreated our, no doubt virtuous and guiltless hero (“Seven Shades”) and an uncensored, no holds harred account of domineering sex (“scream out, don’t hold back now/‘cos I’m not finished with you” in “All Night”).

Such lyrics and themes make David Willitt’s claim that feminism stopped working class men going to university look like it came straight out of The Female Eunach.

For Colt 44, it’s all about power and the need to be in control - and take it back when necessary. “Desperate Measures” and “Seven Shades” show, albeit in exaggerated form what happens when the control is lost (at least I really hope it’s an exaggerated form). Meanwhile, “All Night” celebrates the excitement felt when the control is kept (“Come on baby/Say my name!”).

So women are one of two things in Colt 44’s dichotomous universe: an adrenaline fuelling drug substitute when things are going well (you get references to cocaine and ecstasy in “All Right”) and manipulative cheating whores when things are not so good.

All of which adds a bit of context for the EP’s final song, “Simple Life”, in which the lyrics whinge about wanting a life that’s, well…simple. I suspect, though I have absolutely no proof to back up this assertion, that a simple life for Colt 44 could include having a woman who did what she was told a bit more.

And on that note, I think I better go. I’ve got to head over to the hardware shop to get some chains for the dungeon downstairs after the last sex slave escaped…

12/04/11