Courtney Love, your services will no longer be needed. Thank you, and please...we'll call you.

For every little goth girl that still dons their Kurt Cobain T-shirts and talks of how Hole has sold out, your new savior(s) have come. As their new album "Freaks of Nature" would lead you to believe, the four leading ladies of Drain STH, Maria Sjoholm, Flavia Canel, Anna K., and Martina Axen, are rock's counterpunch to every Britney Spears clone currently nibbling our ears.

But for everyone believing that it's four bitchy women that haven't had a date in 20 years, fear not. In fact, I'm having trouble tearing myself away from a picture of them (thank God for those typing classes so I can do this without looking at the monitor!). Looks, however, are not what I'm here to describe, and definitely NOT the thing you use to describe this band. The aforementioned "Freaks of Nature" album has guitar riffs that could easily rival anything Jerry Cantrell can throw. Also, the song "Alive" opens up very reminiscent of Godsmack's "Voodoo", before entering a more blistering landscape. The same comparison can be made to "I Will Follow", which can be tagged as a more schizophrenic version of the Godsmack hit.

These Swedish beauties can also get a crowd jumping with tracks like their first single, "Simon Says", which includes the classic rap loop "Get your hands in the air/wave 'em like ya just don't care." Right after "Simon..", you run headfirst into tracks like "I Wish..." and "The Bubble Song", which provide acoustic intros that conjure up images of Days of the New and Soundgarden, respectively.

Meanwhile, the words coursing through Maria's lips span a dark spectrum. In "Right Through You", she sounds like someone fed up with being with a weaker half (see the chorus: "I see right through you/everything's broken" and the outro "Now I'm leaving this behind/I'll erase you from my mind/You were never meant to be mine"). In other songs, such as "Enter My Mind", sadistic is the adjective as the words "This is my favorite pain" are peppered throughout the track.

Overall, the music as a whole is better than any one part, but it does lack in one area. If I have any gripe about the album, it is that nearly every song starts off the same way. This gets brushed off as you reach farther into the song. Meanwhile, as you approach the end of the album, it seems as if one song begins to sound like the last, and so forth. This is a problem even the best in the business face, as in the case of a lot of recent albums. On the good side of the coin, "Enter My Mind", sadistic lyric and all, kicks off with a drumbeat which can be cast back to "When The Levee Breaks" (which, I'm sure we'll all agree, is the best drum intro to a song in the history of music, save "Jesus Christ Pose").

By the way, did I mention Maria sounds oddly like Courtney Love in "Leech"? Just thought I'd point that out :-)