There's an overabundance of garage rock bands these days-- dozens upon dozens of Estrus-styled fanboys, all imploding digital-age stooges caught in a chokehold, threatening to fold in on one other like uninspired origami. At this very moment, somewhere outside the Detroit city line, around a hidden bend, an overcrowded field of garage rockers are a-nodding their greasy hair to the cool summer breeze, endlessly enslaved by a 60s mixed metaphor, Camel non-filters spoiling the honeysuckle wonderfulness of the atmosphere.
Whenever a genre explodes, begins copulating with itself, and goes to seed all kinds of reckless, it can be a bitch-and-a-half separating the singular wheat from the inbred chaff. If you listened to every third Nick Zinner wannabe in town, you'd never make it home to enjoy black coffee and the less co-opted strains of your record collection. Sorrow of all sorrows, you might even pass away with D4 on your walkman. Garage rock is the grunge of today, which makes grunge today's hair-metal and leaves the new Vince Neil-fronted Poison in pretty good striking position to make an ironic comeback by next Fall. When a trend gets this out-of-control, I usually nod away, figure the rest of those punk-asses can MC5 it out amongst themselves 'cause I'm too old to scour local toy stores for the musical equivalent of a Cabbage Patch Kid or Tickle Me Elmo.
I'm framing a review of The Von Bondies in this backstory to better point out the Detroit foursome's achievement: of all the garage rock kids I've listened to in the past six months they're my favorite by a mile, and Raw and Rare, the group's live album-- a teaser to keep folks primed for their upcoming second full-length, Pawn Shoppe Heart-- is fucking spooky-ass, grimy rock-n-roll fun.
Why a live record so early in the game? A fair enough question. But remember this: their Jack-White produced debut, 2001's Lack of Communication, sold 20,000 worldwide. That's nothing to sneeze at. This disc's fifteen live and prerecorded tracks were taken from two BBC Radio Broadcasts and a performance at the Lager House in the band's hometown (the two US-recorded tracks, "Unknown" and "It Came from Japan", are the grubbiest, and the only ones that sound fuzzily "live", in that tinny, almost-bad way-- I guess that's the "raw" of the title?) You get to hear the band tuning up, the crowd making little noises, the between-song banter, the songs expanding into finessed jam territory, and the dank echo of the room. Though the songs here are largely available as studio takes on Lack of Communication, a band like The Von Bondies benefits from such unadorned documentation; in a one-take context everything just seems that much more propulsive and urgent.
Throughout this album, these two men and two women sound absolutely joyful, like the music's a curative. There's great boy/girl harmonizing on "Please Please Man" and "Going Down", entire-band harmonizing on "It Came from Japan", and a manic handclapping barrage on "Vacant as a Ghost". "My Baby's Cryin'"-- a slight "It Came from Japan" B-side sung by guitarist Marci Bolen (ex-Slumber Party)-- is made mightier through its pairing with "Cryin'" from Lack of Communication. It shows up twice on this CD, in two slightly different versions-- one live, one pre-recorded; "It Came from Japan" is also repeated, the second version a fuzzy Monoshock mess.
Aside from the originals, The Von Bondies also dig groove-first into two covers. The eight-minute version of 60s staple "Take a Heart" by English garage visionaries The Sorrows is slinky and dirty, and takes enough patient time and care to warrant its ricocheting guitar-piss climax. And the live retooling of the Compulsive Gamblers' "Rock & Roll Nurse" is equally well-wrought-- punch-drunk, sex-freak gritty in its instrumental dueling.
So why do I give props to The Von Bondies, but not to so many other chumps in the pack? Because instead of rote masturbation to genre tropes, this band blends equal parts Misfits and The Animals into their own distinctive Halloween sound; Jason Stollsteimer (guitar, vocals) writes prime hooks, and the entire band offers boatloads of hardcore flesh-and-blood energy. Save yourself some time and forget the flabby pretenders, already! I'm sure the upcoming Pawn Shoppe Heart will be even stronger (and the new material less familiar), but for now, plop this baby in, howl at the moon, dance 'til you drop, and pass out in your own whiskey vomit.
