David Johansen tells you in unrepentant terms in "Gimme Luv and Turn On the Light" why he and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain have the right to lead a New York Dolls in which they are the only original living Dolls. "This is infinity, this is eternity, this is my destiny!" Johansen crows with craggy defiance atop the band's runaway-Yardbirds glee. But being a Doll was always hard work. Under the hair spray, mascara and barely-controlled-Stones guitars, 1973's New York Dolls and '74's Too Much Too Soon were white-young-man-blues records about the steep price of a hellbent life, and Johansen is still swimming in red ink here, in the driving pessimism of "Punishing World" and the burnout ballads "Maimed Happiness" and "I Ain't Got Nothin'." But he, Sylvain and their new Dolls have honed the legendary mania of the early records into a tightened combustion that is part "Personality Crisis" but also packs the matured anxiety and tattered-Sixties classicism of Johansen's 1978 solo debut. And fuck the doubters, Johansen says right up front, in the exuberant zoom of "We're All in Love": "Jumpin' 'round the stage dressed like teenage girls/Castin' our swine before the pearls . . ./They go to work/We go to play."
Wavelength
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