POP MUSIC REVIEW : Abrasive Babes in Toyland

Enter Babes in Toyland. Babes would like to rock your world, sure, but mostly they’d like to make you cringe.

Babes, an abrasive all-woman power trio from Minneapolis, distills the purest female anger, an articulate howl of rage that’s just as shocking the 10th time you encounter it as it is the first; traditional girl-pop structures ripped open and flayed till they ooze. Their latest album, “Fontanelle,” may be the rawest performance ever released by a major label. And at Bogart’s on Friday, Babes went in for the kill.

Big-eyed, dead-blond, wearing a dress with a chaste white-lace sweetheart collar, Babes singer Kat Bjelland can resemble nothing so much as the sweet, goggle-eyed American girls that seem to populate Japanese cartoons. She started most of the songs in a wispy, wavering lullaby croon, then modulated into throat-wrenching screams, howls of anguish and contorted her face into something out of a Francis Bacon painting, all devouring teeth and lips.

If you’re anything other than a jaded rock-scene dude, you shrink back, as if you’ve just witnessed something too personal for a small-club stage--like an ugly scene on a bus. You sort of feel personally implicated in her rage. The closest equivalent may be John Lydon on his first tour with PiL, when he was still filled with punk-rock contempt for his audience, overlaid with a veneer of raped innocence.

Bjelland slaps her guitar strings with an open hand, as if it were a naughty child, and coaxes out dissonant gushes of distortion.

Drummer Lori Barbero was loud, cool, a little bit tribal, pounding on her ride toms with the butt-end of her sticks and almost ignoring her cymbals altogether, a propulsive, highly individual sound--she’s one of the most interesting drummers to come out of the independent rock scene. Maureen Herman’s bass lines were strong and melodic.

But, if Babes are missing a little from the days when the band was inexperienced and a little cheesy--then its power surprised you sort of in spite of itself, while now a Babes audience comes expecting to be shocked--they made up for it with their newfound virtuosity.

Babes finished with “Handsome and Gretel,” the new Reprise album’s hardest-rocking song, and the small slam pit exploded into ecstatic fury. Like Soundgarden, Babes have provided their only remotely commercial song with lyrics that essentially prevent it from ever being played on the radio. You’ve got to admire them for that.

The opening band, the mostly female Red Aunts, played an inept but endearing set of beginning-band punk-rock--they stumbled through a Clash song; they sounded as if they were genuinely pleased to be able to curse on stage; they shrieked in a not un-Bjellandesque manner.

* Babes in Toyland play at the Whisky on Tuesday.