Inger Lorre - Live At The Viper Room album review

Former Nymph returns to her ragged glam-punk heartland

Cover art for Inger Lorre - Live At The Viper Room album

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Infamous for pissing on an A&R man’s desk and other wild antics, glam-punk diva Inger Lorre broke up her former band The Nymphs just as the grunge-fuelled alt.rock boom exploded. She has remained a semi-dormant cult figure ever since, despite sporadic collaborations with famous friends including Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop and Jeff Buckley.

On this tentative live comeback album she revisits Nymphs semi-classics including Imitating Angels and The Highway, now ragged and husky with age, and tackles some choice covers including an agreeably muscular take on Siouxsie And The Banshees’ Monitor. Lorre’s voice has acquired a soulful rawness that can shade into nasal flatness, and her sloppy-sleazy band rarely catch fire, but her two new compositions show promise for the future, especially the voluptuous blues-soaked anti-love howl Hate In My Heart.

Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.