Okay, it's officially over now. Slap fives with the other team, pack up the equipment, get your Little Debbies and Capri Suns from Mrs Freed; it's time to go home. Garage rock, I mean. It's probably silly-- no, it's definitely silly-- to declare a scene that was 80% media as D.O.A., but an album like The Datsuns' debut will drive a man to such pointless hyperbole. A few months back I declared, in a review of the brilliant-by-comparison Selby Tigers, that garage rock had reached minute #12 on its Warhol watch. It's now on 16.
If The Datsuns serve any purpose, it's to remind us that 70s glam/garage-rock was largely accountable for the abomination that was 80s hair-metal (or wait, is that cool now? I forgot to check the Brit mags this week). When the guitarists start feeling the urge to show off how fast their digits can fly, when singers really, really want you to know that they're just fucking thrashing all around that stage, dude, when lyrics take the slightest little turn toward macho and misogyny... hey, look what you got! Mötley Crüe without the recording budget!
And speaking of which, all this self-consciously gritty production is starting to get on my nerves. V2 should know better, being the label that bought the White Stripes from Sympathy-- "Fell in Love with a Girl" was a hit with me, my 16-year-old sister and the demographics we represent because of Jack White's song, not the over-EQed production. It would've been a hit if it were sung by Justin Timberlake on a slick Neptunes beat, or Tim McGraw in laminated Nashville; the energy is inherent. The Datsuns don't have exuberance imbedded in their material, they just have in-quotes "attitude" and songs called "Motherfucker from Hell" and "Fink for the Man" recorded in a tar pit.
Seriously, if you're going to break into mid-song Skynyrd freakouts ("Freeze Sucker") go ahead and record it well, and while you're at it, lose the aren't-we-clever retro-reference band name. Market songs like "Lady", with its pole-swinging riff and upper-register screeches, to the strip club circuit where it belongs. Don't forget to pay royalties to Steven Tyler for them yowls, MC5 for the aesthetic, and the Nuge for all the riffs. And please, please, please give the cowbell from "What Would I Know" back to Blue Oyster Cult.
Face it, all the good "garage" bands (Hives, McLusky) are halfway intelligent plain-simple punk from foreign lands, or pop in thrift store clothing like The Strokes. Let's stop using the term altogether and boycott The Nouns bands, and hope the labels realize that people just couldn't give a fuck about bands like The Datsuns.
