It's all too easy to disparage the ironic retro tackiness of the title and album art-- me, I can't help thinking of all the millennium marketing schemes I encountered during the last months of 1999: t-shirts and mugs emblazoned with "01-01-00," "millennium clocks" counting down the time to the new year, etc. Did anyone actually buy any of that crap? And for those who did, what did they do with it after January 1? I envision all these t-shirts and mugs and clocks (now impotently blinking "00:00:00" for the remaining duration of their battery life) now taking up metric tons of landfill space. Thankfully, Destination 2000 has a slightly longer shelf life and doesn't deserve to be buried alongside the aforementioned merchandising disasters. As the title sort of implies, it's less a vision of the future as it is a document of the path Love as Laughter took to get there.
With Destination 2000, Sam Jayne completes his transmogrification from scruffy indie rocker (as part of Lync) to eccentric bedroom-ridden lo-fi noisemaker (Love as Laughter's first album, The Greks Bring Gifts) to full-time rock 'n' roller. With a newly beefed-up lineup backing him, Jayne has refined the heavily classic rock-influenced sound of the band's last album, #1 USA, sharpening the songwriting considerably and the production just a little. Oh, I'm sorry, did the words "classic rock" scare you away? Fear not, 'cause Love as Laughter gets their raw blues-based riffs the way Hendrix and the Stones originally envisioned it. Just slather on a few layers of MC5-style garage-rock distortion and let Jayne's analog- reverbed wail blow the whole sound up to stadium size, and you've got the slack boogie of "On the Run." Elsewhere on the album, the band mixes their rock riffage in with some new-wave accouterments; "Stakes Avenue" features stiff, chunky rhythms and vocoder effects that burst into sweeping big-rock choruses.
Love as Laughter also try on a few other genres, with varying results; "Stay Out of Jail" pushes grunge-punk adrenaline through crummy, overdriven amps borrowed from Mudhoney and Nirvana, and "Margaritas" is a welcome return to their shambling pop roots. But there's also the obligatory sloppy country hoedown ("Statuette") and the obligatory stark acoustic track ("Demon Contacts"), both of which seem out of place on Destination 2000.
Surprisingly, though, Love as Laughter fits right in with the rash of rawk-band signings over at Sub Pop (the Hellacopters, Zen Guerrilla, Murder City Devils, Gluecifer, Nebula, etc.), but Destination 2000 is more than just a series of three-chord head-bashers; it's a vibrant re-creation of lo-fi rock 'n' roll that feels genuine, unforced, and thankfully free of nostalgic excesses and pouty posing. Sometimes, it's necessary to take a backwards glance at the past to get a feel for the future.
