by Nitsuh Abebe
Here Is the "Is-Not" collects a number of 7" and EP tracks from Chicago's Scissor Girls, a band whose extremely fractured, deconstructive take on punk attitudes and post-punk scratchiness always turned out far more accessible than it probably should have been. Given the format of Here Is the "Is-Not," the sound is even more accessible than on the band's full-lengths -- since most of its tracks appeared separately, all of them are fairly direct. Of course, this is not to imply that the Scissor Girls are for everyone -- their sound blends the fractured post-punk of Wire and the Fall with no-wave deconstruction and takes it to Melt-Banana-style extremes.