As far as garage-punk bands go, Detroit's Dirtbombs have about everything you could want: a magnetic frontman, a famously frantic live show, a handful of songs catchy enough to show up in TV commercials. But Mick Collins has never been content to run his band as just a garage-punk band. Instead, he follows his batshit conceptual tangents wherever they might lead him. Ten years ago, the band released Ultraglide in Black, a collection of covers of classic soul and funk tracks. And even though it's a ballsy move to translate songs by Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye into simplistic stomp-rock bangers, those songs at least shared some structural similarities with the punk songs that the band had already been playing. On the new Party Store, the band leaps even further into uncharted territory, turning in a full hour of classic Detroit techno covers.
Collins' love of techno runs deep. Detroit, of course, has served as a breeding ground for plenty of disparate genres of music, and garage rock and ancestral techno belong to the city the same way transcendent pop-soul and melanin-challenged battle-rap do. Collins himself has been a techno devotee for a long time, and he even made a few techno tracks himself early on. The song selection on Party Store is the work of a true aficionado; canonical classics like "Strings of Life" and "Bug in the Bass Bin" share space with some truly early electro examples of the form, like Cybotron's "Cosmic Cars". But there's still something jarring in hearing a band known for sweaty, loose workouts take on a genre of music where precision and repetition and icy control are paramount.
That's the point, of course, and the album gets a lot of mileage out of the way techno synth-riffs work just fine as punk rock guitar riffs if you play them with the right scratchy intensity. The Dirtbombs have a strong enough rhythm section that the tracks rarely defeat them, and it's fun hearing Collins pitch his wail down to a robotic monotone delivery. Plenty of these old techno tracks are totally silly fun on some level, and Collins knows it. So he delivers the lyrics straight ("Smoking on his cigarette/ Cruising to his car cassette," "Laser beams cloud your dreams"), without any sort of wink.
The whole ridiculous idea reaches its highest state on the band's version of "Good Life", an immortal track from Kevin Saunderson's Inner City. (For whatever reason, the band covers the Basement Roots mix rather than the canonical one.) This is a song with actual singing on it, so Collins gets a chance to cut loose vocally, doing a pretty good subdued version of house-diva histrionics. Around him, the band attacks the beat with the same skritchety lunacy that James Chance once applied to James Brown grooves. The end result transcends the silliness of the concept and turns into something that Flipper would've been proud of.
But as fun as the album is, there's a big problem sitting right at its center: a 21-minute take on "Bug in the Bass Bin", the evolutionary leftfield track from Carl Craig's Innerzone Orchestra. Craig himself shows up on the Dirtbombs' version, playing some awesomely trashy keyboards, but the song is still an endless marathon of splintered, discordant guitars that takes up more than a third of an album that's a party otherwise. You can hear Collins straining for "Maggot Brain" expressionism, but you need a genius guitarist like Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel to pull off "Maggot Brain", and Collins isn't it. Still, even if the Dirtbombs' version of "Bug in the Bass Bin" isn't anything you need to hear more than twice, it's weirdly heartening that the band actually tried it. Like the album that surrounds it, it's an awesomely doomed attempt at an idea that nobody's ever really tried before. And even if these Dirtbombs covers don't take on their own lives the way the Ultraglide in Black covers did, you still have to respect their gall.
