It sometimes happens that I buy a record and can't stop listening to it, bowled over by its energy, punch, and hooks, and when I pull my head up out of it, no one else has paid any attention. It's kind of annoying, and it always makes me want to slap the collective cognoscenti up the side of their expensively coiffed heads and scream "Are You Retarded? How Did You Miss This Album?"
Now, in some sense, I've already done that with regard to Plastic Fang, the penultimate JSBX disc. So I probably don't need to go again into the fact that the trendhumping bastards who rin the indie music mags decided that Spencer & Co. were so five minutes ago when the White Stripes showed up, only to dust off their late-90's admiration and put it back on the shelf as soon as it was safe to do so.
No, I've better things to do, like explain in vivid detail how hard this CD rocks, how blistering its grooves, how satisfying its swagger. Because while it might be a stretch to say that the Blues Explosion were the Stooges of the 90's, similarities exist, and it wasn't too far back that Plastic Fang vied with Raw Power for the most turns in my car stereo.
Take, for example "Sweet n' Sour," the album's opener, which obviously will never have the kind of essential cachet of "Search and Destroy", but emulates the breakneck speed of that song with a kind of Detroit-by-way-of-Memphis roar. You may get in the mood to find a girl and take her for a ride in your Datsun, rather than roast the flesh of your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women, but you'll feel it just as strong.
With that, we move into the album's underlying theme, a retro-50's monster-movie riffs starring Spencer in I Was a Teenage Bluesman. Iggy never needed to do this, because he'd established himself as an Id From the Black Lagoon long previous. "She Said," sets this off nicely, giving us the lovingest werewolf ever, whereas Iggy had been the werewoflingest lover, hungry to be your dog.
Am I reaching? Not by much, my friends, not by much. Rock n' Roll has been producing sacred monsters since Elvis, whom Spencer pays explicit homage to with every note he sings. I don't know if Elvis would have ever sang of himself the way Spencer does in "Killer Wolf" -- as the ugly, lonely one -- but many have surmised that Elvis understood that feeling:
In other ways Memphis was a oppressively impersonal urban dream for an only child, shy and strangely insecure. Living in a city project. Working a monotonous succession of jobs after school. Going off by himself to play the guitar. . . . "Nobody knew I sang, I wasn't popular in school, I wasn't dating anybody."
-Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway
The point is that we all go Down into the Beast every now and again. We sink down into the mire from which we wriggled like a vampire from Anne Rice's novels: as retreat and recharge. So when Spencer sings of "Mother Nature," he is paying that homage to the Roots Music de Willendorf on behalf of all of us who forget what the hell Rock music is supposed to sound like. Elvis knows from that, and for that matter, so did Iggy.
But then, after "Mother Nature" Spencer had to just do the most uncool thing he could possibly have done, the thing that in 2002 would have made the erudite clercs of the critical class wash their hands. He sang a song containing the G-word, repeatedly, in one of the album's hardest-rocking songs, "Mean Heart." And he sounded like he meant it.
You've got to...Now, I don't want to say that your average hip-genuflecting music critic was put off by the possibility (it is Spencer we're dealing with, after all) of a sincere-sounding yelp unto the deity of Protestant Christianity, but in the Year of Garage Rock that was 2002, exactly what else was not to love on this album? Why should anyone have laughed at Spencer & Co. for doing retro stuff, when that was all that anyone was doing?
Get right with God
Fill your heart with love
We haven't got much time
We've only got one life
But hey, what the hell do I know. My limited, non-interning-at-Spin-fetching-coffee-for-Chuck-Klosterman experience tells me nothing other than this record is a fine meaty slab of the good stuff, one that passes my Repeat Test. If I've listened to it all the way through, and I don't eject it instantaneously because I've got something else I want to throw in, and the first song comes in again, I'm leaving it in.
Grade: LL
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