So for those of you who aren't familiar with them, the Damned are the band that beat the Sex Pistols to every punch in the late 70s, including being the first UK punk band to release an album. They never quite sank in with the rest of the punk movement, though, and thus, the Pistols have gone on to be heralded as the leaders of a revolution, whilst the Damned have spent the last 25 or so years milling about on the sidelines. Of course, the Damned never adhered to anything that could be called punk convention, instead preferring to let Vaudeville, goth and cartoonish melodrama to permeate their sound to the point where they became impossible to pigeonhole.
I won't lie to you: the Damned's new album isn't very good. In fact, the Damned have only ever recorded a few albums that were-- for instance, their debut or 1979's Machine Gun Etiquette. The thing is, their new album is hard to recommend simply because the band is totally out of touch with what's gone on in the past few yeas in music. Point of fact is that the Damned's albums have never corresponded to their time periods or felt truly prescient. This I don't even necessarily consider bad-- it can be an asset in the right hands.
However, nothing could make up for just how annoying these songs are. This album is stuffed full of little idiosyncrasies that quickly grate, and it's stuffed even fuller with some truly awful lyrics. You get to hear about buying a new Playstation on "Song.com," which from the title alone should be held suspect. "I'm just killing some time/ It's a fantasy crime," they sing on "Thrill Kill" in harmonies that wouldn't sound terribly out of place on a follow-up to "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Nature Trail to Hell (In 3-D)."
The album is naturally also packed with questionable musical decisions, like the crummy faux-operatics that open "Absinthe." "Amen" actually features some great backing harmonies and powerfully shifting chords over a strange bell arrangement in the chorus, but the guys can't stay focused long enough for it to develop into anything interesting. Instead, vocalist Dave Vanian (one of two founding Damned appearing here) intones ridiculously over-the-top spoken word bits and irritating vocal affectations.
Likewise, the vibes and even some of the guitar work on "The End of Time" are great, but the chanting background vocals render the song a great deal more comical than it seems intended to be. This is followed by "Obscene," which features a chanted chorus of harmonized Vanian's warbling "Obscene! The Dream!" and various other rhyming two-syllable words and phrases into an echo chamber (or more likely a reverb processor).
One of the oddest moves on the album, though, is the coda to the aforementioned "Amen." The song fades back in with an instrumental passage featuring samples of the ocean, birds, and a woman saying, "It's so simple. It's fast, it's free, it's easy." Basically, it sounds like the band wanted to try their hand at modern electronica, but mistook it instead for new age with samples. Regardless, it sounds out of place even on an album that delights in covering as much territory as possible.
Part of what surprised me about Grave Disorder, though, is just how good some of the music is in patches. If you can ignore the rotten gothic dirge "Beauty of the Beast" that closes the record, you might find yourself having some fun listening to this disc. Usually, there's at least one point in each song that grabs your attention and allows you to put aside the overarching goofiness for a few seconds. For one thing, the band still has a lot of energy, and new keyboardist Monty Oxy Moron's vintage sounds bring a lot to the band as well. The groove on opener "Democracy" is excellent, as is the underlying rhythm section on "Thrill Kill."
Of course, those two songs bookend the moronic "Song.com," which features everything from lyrics about surfing the web to half-assed Ventures-style riffs and shouts of "surf's up!" The analogy of surfing and surfing the web is so played out it's painful, but it's pretty apparent that the band aren't taking themselves seriously. Even so, novelty recordings don't have a long halflife, and by the second listen, the song grows extremely... well, bad.
Overall, this Damned album isn't so crappy it steams, but it's hardly anything that anyone outside of the band's most hardcore fanbase has to hear. Part of the problem with reviewing a band like the Damned is that there are so few apt comparison points, and the band's history is so developed. Therefore, I'm rating the album based basically on how much I liked it, which, obviously, wasn't a whole lot. Ultimately, your time is probably better spent elsewhere.
