If ever anyone needed a reset button, it’s Derek Stanton. Over the course of three promising but frustrating albums with his prior band Awesome Color, the singer/guitarist drove himself into a ditch of Detroit retro-worship. The primal, sexual, radical sounds of the Stooges and the MC5 were Awesome Color’s paint-by-numbers palette, but aside from kicking out a few sweaty, muscular jams, the Michigan-bred band never managed to creep out from under the shadows of their granddads, let alone retool that sound for a new frame of reference. If someone cooks up a Motown: The Musical-style tribute to Detroit’s late-'60s/early-'70s rock scene, Stanton could lead the house band. That’s not entirely a compliment.
Stanton managed to find new footing last year with Can’t Love, the full-length debut by his new band, Turn to Crime. With new collaborators Ian Saylor and Dorian Foerg, he’s modified his basic Detroit-centric approach. As on Can’t Love, Turn to Crime’s new album Actions strips away the massive, spastic guitars of Awesome Color in favor of a sculptural, hollowed-out thrum. Instead of finding a new method by which to draw inspiration from his influences, though, Stanton has simply modified that list. It’s not a dramatic shift. Action primarly sets itself apart by doing to Suicide exactly what Awesome Color did to the Stooges: mimicking them. "This Is What You Wanted" smears swirls of synths over a stiff, faux-motorik beat that misses the tension between organic and inorganic that made Suicide so astounding.
Things get worse on __"__Impatience", an appropriately named drone that’s about as transfixing as cough syrup dripping from a spoon. The song has the cruelty to stop cold after four minutes, only to lurch back to life and trudge on for another nerve-deadening minute and a half. "Prince of Slackers" tries harder, with its loose-lipped, Lou Reed sneer, but its clattering guitars and cardboard-box beat result in the unfortunate—and possibly accidental—outcome of sounding like a half-assed Strokes demo.
As with Awesome Color’s collected output, there are glimpses of brilliance on Actions. Stanton’s barbed-wire guitar solo on "Light" is a spasm of inspired lunacy; the underwater funk of "Without a Care" has a breezily goofy hook to it. The title track is a dead ringer for Iggy’s Berlin period, all chilled melody and Bowie-indebted atmospherics, but stops short of being a rehash. An entire album of such stuff could be beautiful. But "Feels Right" highlights Stanton's deficiencies as a lyricist. "If it feels right/ Then it is right," he chants throughout the song’s eight-and-a-half-minute run time. The dedication to such a banal bit of druggy sloganeering doesn’t translate into much; it just seems lazy. But hey, if it feels right, right?
Stanton and crew clearly adore the styles of music they emulate. But they refuse—or are simply unable—to ignite with a spark of their own. That is, after all, what groups like the Stooges and Suicide were all about: annihilating shit to see what might spring up in its ashes. When it comes to retroactivity in music, there’s spirited revivalism, and there’s Time-Life oldies infomercial nostalgia. With Actions, Stanton inches closer to the latter.
