"It's a song about being in love but also being independent," Jennifer Clavin said of "Next Stop", the rollicking single from L.A. garage rockers Bleached's debut LP Ride Your Heart. Like Bleached's sound, the video pays homage to the retro cool of the Shangri-Las (motorcycles, leather jackets, ponytails), but it also mines the tension of that thematic split-screen Clavin mentions. It cuts between Jennifer, lounging around with her guy and joyriding on the back of his motorcycle, and bassist Jessica, causing all sorts of trouble at a party with her friends. Bleached aren't presenting romantic love and roguish independence as two mutually exclusive entities: In the video, both of them seem perfectly happy. But they communicate this same message more viscerally in the sound of their music, where sweet, manicured melodies and and pummeling, dirt-under-the-nails punk energy collide. It's one of the more commanding revisionist takes on the 60s girl group sound to come along in a minute.
The Clavins are best known as veterans of the beloved, now-defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, where they both cut more colorful figures than they do in Bleached: Jessica set the pace for the band's manic, pogoing, sped-up surf-rock rhythm section, while Jennifer's (better known then by her Dracula-esque stage name, Victor Fandgore) signature move was singing (though more often, screaming) into a rotary telephone rigged up like a mic. Three years after their break-up, Mika Miko's legend is established yet ephemeral; like so many underground heroes, they never made a record that quite captured the caterwauling craziness of their live show. Not that they cared: "I think we come off better live than we do recorded," Jessica said in a 2009 interview, "It's better to have that impact as a live band though, isn't it?" The rest of the band nodded in agreement.
It's kind of ironic, then, that Ride Your Heart succeeds precisely where the final Mika Miko album-- the spirited but thin-sounding We Be Xuxa-- failed: it manages to capture some of the infectious energy of the Clavins' live show. The difference is all in the production: Ride Your Heart is lush but still maintains a certain loose, inviting sloppiness, which suits the more upbeat songs particularly well. Opener "Looking For a Fight" lurches forward with a grumbling, belligerent swagger, while Jennifer's whiplashed howl on "Next Stop" ("Until next tiiiiiime") makes the song feel like an adrenaline rush: It sounds like she's shouting the whole thing out of a convertible as it zips around a tight corner. Jennifer's vocals sound comparatively stiff and uninspired on "Dreaming Without You" (she doesn't find much emotion in the repeated refrain "Baby, don't cry/ Baby, don't cry"), but the stomping percussion and guitar solo (which sounds straight out of a Flamin' Groovies track and cuts through like a beam of California sunshine) shakes the song out of its stupor.
Not every song on Ride Your Heart is so lucky. Bleached's songcraft often feels bland and unimaginative, relying on familiar, pop-worn imagery ("Waiting by the Telephone") and generic declarations of love. (The inert "Outta My Mind" doesn't move far beyond its girl-group-revival-by-numbers hook, "Get out of my mind, boy/ You know I think about you all of the time.") Though there's an electric current coursing through Ride Your Heart, it's too often wasted on mundane material-- which is especially disappointing given how zany and lyrically imaginative their previous band was. Hopefully more of that signature flair will creep into future Bleached releases: It's hard to be content with them waiting by the telephone when we've seen them scream into it.
