- It’s been a whole year and a half since all the irony and bile, industrial beats and broken synth-pop dreams that are Bitchratch splattered on to the recorded medium. In that time at least one of their members has gone on to become a crusading lawyer fighting for justice by day, leaving the night for shredding the legacy of Cyndi Lauper with power-saw samples and a bad attitude. It sounds like it could make a good TV pilot: a tense legal drama where every episode climaxes in a sick keytar solo. It’s harder to make it work in real life and yet Bitchratch appear to have survived with members 80-P, Mickey Rourkes and Dashiki Ciccone intact (and I’m just assuming that these cartoonish disguises represent the same jokers as before). On the evidence of the boldly titled I Know My Truth, they even appear to have progressed their musical style, plunging further into that pastiche nightmare of sounds they love to smash together.

The EP kicks off with the grainy TV fuzz, drum-machine and no-wave funk of Spit The Dummy: a strutting, psychotic background for a Lydia Lunch-like sexy-cooed vocal; there are fragments of shamisen thrown in to really complete the feeling you’re hallucinating a New York sushi bar circa 1983. Laura Brannigan Hologram sounds like its microprocessor fused midway through the chorus of Gloria before Bitchratch got their claws in, slapped a synthgaze background on it and turned the whole thing into a Warhol-esque art installation.

East Coast / West Coast brings game with a sludgy, saw-wave electro riff, mated with soaring synth melodies and more of that cooing cum shrieking; it’s a bit like a Crystal Castles update on Suicide. Real Housewife is content to steal a bit of Like A Virgin and burn up a little repressed sexual tension over a slowly building, but finally pretty gutsy synth-pop banger. It’s moments like this that I begin to wonder whether a full fledged synth-pop star might one-day burst out of Bitchratch, if not a Sky Ferreira, certainly something like Canada’s Lowell, who has a shared fascination with sentimental, ironic pastiche.

Tongues is a great electro-industrial banger: so loaded down with elements it’s like a jungle, but it brings everything together with a brutal force, including the moaned vocals, which makes this sound like HTRK with about a million times more energy. The Danceclub Remix of Male Eruption from Bitchratch’s first EP is a bit uncoordinated, but that probably says more about where they were then than anything else and it still builds to a naff but unapologetically euphoric, uh, climax. Final cut, Bananas, comes closer than any other track to leaping the ironic barrier into straight synth-pop. It’s almost a shame that it always pulls back into cheesy lounge and ear-rupturing dissonances, but thanks to those affectations it does -like everything that Bitchratch does- stay icy cool.

I Know My Truth makes good on the unexpected promise of the almost throw-away first Bitchratch EP, Freshbatch Vol 1. It takes all the many styles and rich veins of pop-culture kitsch with which they are fascinated and -if such a thing is possible- does them a large amount of deranged, DIY justice. I don’t know if that synth-pop diva echo I heard is just some Bitchratch induced fever fantasy on my part, but wherever they go, the journey is proving to be fascinating.

- Chris Cobcroft.