Suicide Girls

It's not like the Suicide Girls started a band. The indie-minded porn site lends a few of its models to this collection -- overdone photos of goth tattoo enthusiasts posing in lingerie and caressing old Skinny Puppy and Echo & the Bunnymen LPs. And their brand name is out in front on the disc, as if they were a band. But no. Black Heart Retrospective is really just a collection of songs someone might listen to while contemplating becoming a suicide girl, or maybe a stand-in for the mix tape you're supposed to pretend Suicide Girls make in their spare time. You know, the dumbly obvious -- tired tracks from Ministry ("Every Day Is Halloween"), Siouxsie and the Bansees ("Cities in Dust"), and Bauhaus ("She's in Parties") -- along with the relatively more left-field, like Puppy's "VX Gas Attack" or a Killing Joke selection. There's also unreleased material from Alkaline Trio (covering Sisters of Mercy) and Atmosphere, whose "Don't Know How Much" is pretty cool but completely out of place as the only hip-hop anywhere on the set. Sure, Suicide Girls might listen to hip-hop. But if they do, there should be more than one track representing it here. Black Heart Retrospective is similar to the hundreds of industrial pop comps that have been issued over the years, most from Cleopatra. So it does the job in that respect, giving the listener a quick primer. But if you're a fan of the groups here, you have these songs already, and if you're a Suicide Girls supporter, your web subscription will reveal photography much saucier than the cheesecake inside Black Heart. ~ Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide