The Mooney Suzuki have earned their shot at mainstream acceptance-- after spending years touring and suffering countless accusations of stealing The Strokes' shtick (despite the fact that they formed years before The Strokes and generally embrace a pre-Velvet Underground aesthetic), the members of one of New York's most consistently underrated garage-rock revival groups are understandably fed up with their relative obscurity. For Alive & Amplified, the band has scrubbed off the caked-on Detroit grime of Electric Sweat and hit the studio with hot-shit production team The Matrix, whose recent Extreme Makeover work with Liz Phair understandably led to suspicion among many of the band's devotees. The resulting album is a glossy, well-polished document of a band reluctantly selling its soul in the name of wider exposure.
The real problem here is that The Matrix crew has absolutely nothing to offer the band, whose raucous and refreshingly genuine Nuggets fetishizing arguably reached its apex on their previous release. Where Jim Diamond's bare-bones production allowed the band space to develop their self-contained energy in concise bursts of inspired proto-punk homage, The Matrix's luster robs Suzuki's music of its greasy authenticity.
To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs. Sammy James, Jr.'s vocals have been unwisely pushed to the forefront of the mix, accentuating his lyrical awkwardness, while James and Graham Tyler's dual guitar attack has been dissected and isolated, leading to a markedly sterile sound. In the past, each element of the band's sound blended harmoniously in a melange of mod and classic rock influences, but this album is covered in the thick fingerprints of The Matrix team's calculated, high-end sheen.
Opener "Primitive Condition" immediately finds the band in uncharacteristically clumsy form. The song's generic country-fried guitar hook is forced and uninspired, while James offers perhaps his most insipid lyrics to date, cribbing from The Bloodhound Gang's notebook with lines like, "Let's get in a primitive position/ We're just fancy animals with hands/ And animal glands." The track, like much of the album, is overwhelmed by derivative classic rock bloat, and the lean, muscular sound of their unabashed early Who reverence is sorely missed.
"Alive & Amplified", the album's first single, sounds specifically constructed for mass consumption, and the song, with its tired 70s dinosaur rock replication and overbearing chorus, insinuates itself with the subtlety of a battering ram. "Legal High" is so watered-down and ineffectual that it would feel at home next to a Vines track, while "Loose n' Juicy" and "Hot Sugar" achieve a level of unremarkable blues-rock plagiarism worthy of The Blues Brothers. The album's few high points, such as they are, hint at the band's former glory-- "New York Girls" just barely touches bases with The New York Dolls, and "Sometimes Somethin'" is an effective imitation of overwrought Stones balladry, though it sounds out of place after the frantic and humorless "Shake That Bush Again".
Stories of the grueling recording process that spawned Alive & Amplified provide some insight into the album's general blandness: James has said that 90% of what The Matrix presented sounded like "someone else's multi-platinum hit." Half of that sounds about right; this certainly doesn't sound like The Mooney Suzuki, even if it does sound strikingly similar to every other "garage" cash-in band on the market. But the chances of this album going platinum are about the same as The Mooney Suzuki providing music for a video game soundtra-- oh, right. Hell, I suppose stranger things have happened.
