The image of the cocky, sneering Swede-rocker first entered the American lexicon sometime in early 2002, as Sahara Hotnights and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Hives pranced their xFC-garage pastiche onto the pop stage, squirming into the hearts and minds of anyone with M2 and a Vines record freshly wedged in their stereo. High-pitched, fevered chirping about garage rock revivals and Jack White's pants ensued; bands started casually citing the MC5 and the Electric Prunes as super-super-influential. We talked about Sweden; we whispered about Detroit. We dreamt about the second coming of Paul Revere.
Mid-2003: revival hyperbole has settled down, Swede-mania has long collapsed. But Caesars (also known as Caesars Palace-- or to Scandinavians as the Twelve Caesars, a previous tag) are poised for their very own eye-opening stateside permeation, as Astralwerks perplexingly releases 39 Minutes of Bliss (In An Otherwise Meaningless World), a pieced-together singles package masquerading as an album (tracks were culled from Caesars' 1998 debut and a handful of subsequently released EPs); it functions for the most part as the thumping "garage rock" soundtrack to a bunch of goofy beer commercials. Curiously, a forty-five second advertisement featuring a troop of lovely twenty-somethings provocatively sashaying through a flooded, soapy laundry room seems like the appropriate venue for Caesars' entirely artificial, smooth- but-empty product. It's just as believable.
With their rousing mod riffs and ample percussion, Caesars' Kinks-ish (circa Village Green) retro-jams are palatable enough (and certainly catchy enough) for modern rock radio, but they're also studio-polished to the point of becoming impenetrable; the tunes themselves are a predictable blend of spent Brit pop (half these tracks play like flimsy Oasis B-sides) and gooey American lite rock. Opener "Sort It Out" boasts wildly meaningless lyrics ("I wanna smoke crack/ Cause you're never coming back/ I wanna sniff glue/ Cause I can't get over you"); they have the potential to be sorta...charmingly asinine, until the relentlessly thick electric guitar and simpering pseudo-Doors organ lines suck all the fun out, coating everything in Smashmouth goo.
The possibility of squeezing a good snicker from 39 Minutes' brazen anti-poetics wanes fast: "(I'm Gonna) Kick You Out" nobly offers, "I'm a man with a fork/ In a world of soup," but it's already too late to hope for prize-winning lyrics from the vacant, mechanical instrumentation (relentless guitar, plodding bass) that makes up the song. Frontman Cesar Vidal has perfected the smug, nasal moan and polished posturing of his white-belted countrymen, but his snotty yelp is so flat and hollow that it barely qualifies as a credible whine-- by the time 39 Minutes reaches the droned-out "Suzy Creamcheese", it's hard to even dig up a half-assed grin for the title.
Caesars have managed only to co-opt the self-satisfied smirk of rock 'n' roll. Their promise of bliss is about as viable as the beer commercials this record is presently being used to sell, but not nearly as fun or mercifully fleeting.
