Just because you can see through punk rock, like a shot glass of vodka, doesn't mean the fire inside is dead. Two things matter: Your dosage -- the volume the music sounds best at – and the potency of the music -- the ultimate proof. The Distillers haven't spent 12 years on a shelf mellowing out. They're not so smooth. In fact, the wonder they create is in their mashing together of very active ingredients, plundering through punk like it's just being discovered.

A little history - Pretend it's Thanksgiving of '98. Take a nineteen-year-old woman with a mohawk that looks like a new and perfect circular saw has been thrown through her cranium, her name is Brody. She's the singer/screecher, originally from Melbourne, Australia - the continent colonized so England could shuffle its convicts off because their guillotine blades were getting dull. While Down Under, Brody was in a band called Sourpuss. Find a guitar player from Detroit that sounds like she's carving tablature on a concrete curb. That would be Casper. She's a proud crusty punk. Fire up long-time skin bruiser and drum attacker Mat Young, formerly of the ADZ and CH3, melt them altogether and surround the compound with the barbed wire bass of Ms. Kim Chi, who uses her ass flap patch to piss in public without a care, and you've got it right. Moonshine's best with homegrown ingredients, coupled with a time-tested, family-protected process.

The Distillers are as fiery and natural, yet rusty and jagged as their ridge-running brethren. Bootleggers and The Distillers also share something directly in common: a healthy dose of incest. Brody and Kim met at Kim's work. Brody knew a friend who knew a drummer. Conversations that began with "I didn't know you played..." ended with a band quickly. They do have one thing in common that isn’t by chance: Kill from the heart. All members are now in a band they truly want to be in -- not to not to just hammer out crude notes like role-playing, bummed-out monkeys. Being so, they burned out all the crud and heated their music to make it simple and powerful and good. Their main ingredients are filtered over and over again. Each time, the proof getting higher and higher. All well and good, what do they sound like? Don't try to make the pigeon hole for the Distillers smaller than “punk.”

You'll get splinters just trying to shove them in it. If the music industry were as honest as package labeling, some bands would have to suffer the indignity of being Utah 3.2% beer. Fuck, stick a rag in the top of The Distillers and you've got yourself a Molotov. Reminisce over the talented spirits of the Plasmatics' Wendy O. Williams (RIP), the caught-on-fire accident of the Circle Jerks, the hooked smile of Patti Smith (They cover "Ask the Angels"), the dysfunction of the Germs, and the uterine sparkle and barb of the Lunachicks. Swirl it around a bit. Get a whiff of the bouquet. Tinkle in a hint of the crust and cleanse- the-wound drill of Crass. If you haven't heard of them, I'm pretty sure you know at least one of the bands that already admire and have played with them: X, The Dwarves, Rocket From the Crypt, U.S. Bombs, The Criminals, L.E.S. Stitches, The Ducky Boys, and Litmus Green. They already have dates scheduled with H20, AFI, and the Nerve Agents. Remember, like The Distillers have, "If it' ain't broke, don't break it." Burning it to the ground is another matter entire. It's all in the distillation. Screw the top off.